Wake up, sleepyhead. We have to go now,” Bari said.
“Where? What are you talking about?”
“Horatia needs us. Our sister is in trouble.”
I ordered Amantha to make a wish directing us where to go. And in a blink of my magic we were in the Brume, the Fourth Queendom. Queen Daria had laid down her arms and given up magic without the guards raising a single sword against her. It was just as dangerous a land for the Entente as the Hinter was.
We are too close to the palace. We are too close to one another, I thought as we walked through the streets like tourists. We stopped in front of a store.
“I don’t understand what we are doing here. What is this place?”
Bari put a finger to her lips. “You trust me, don’t you?” she whispered. Everything was out of sorts. But she was still Bari and there was a part of me that had missed being at her heels, even if it meant being in her shadow. I nodded, and we stepped inside after Bari used her magic to unlock the door.
It looked like a dress shop. There were beautiful fabrics and dresses in every style. There were no customers. It was quiet. We moved through to the back of the shop and Bari knocked on the wall. The wall slipped open, and we stepped through.
It took me a second to take it all in. There were walls of bottles filled with cloudy liquids. There was a table in the center of the room with a glass globe on it. There were cards on the table with drawings on them. There was a teacup, empty except for leaves settled at the bottom. And on the ground next to the table was a woman lying still as the dead at Horatia’s feet.
There was a whimpering sound behind us. We turned around and saw another of our sisters, Ocenth, who looked ready to cry.
Bari gave her a stern look. “Tears will not fix this.” She returned her attention to Horatia.
“Silly humans. They never can stop themselves from touching every single thing,” Horatia quipped as she nervously grabbed one of her curls and began twisting it. For all her bravado, she knew she was in trouble.
“Is she . . . ?” I began.
“Just sleeping. She touched the spindle.”
Behind her was a spindle made of gorgeous blond wood. I recognized it as the same kind that some of our wands were made of. My brain belatedly began to put the pieces together. On the table the tea leaves in the cup seemed to be moving, forming a face. The bottles . . . the wands . . . the globe . . . the tea leaves . . .
“You’re running a magic shop right under Queen Daria’s nose?” I exclaimed. “You can’t trust humans to keep your secret!”
“We need to keep magic alive in the Queendoms,” Ocenth explained, finally speaking and wiping her eyes.
“We’re creating goodwill. The humans that come here walk away with their Futures foretold, their questions about their petty existences answered. Their crops heartier. We use small magic, and they are oh so grateful. We give magic a good name. And we need to practice. We need to know them if we ever want to . . . ,” Horatia countered, defensively.
“Want to what?” I asked, feeling unsettled. It seemed like way too much of a risk for sharpening our craft.
“Want to . . . live with them,” she said, almost too quickly.
“Now is not the time to argue ethics.” Bari interrupted us, her hand on the woman’s wrist. “We need to wake her.”
“We need a Fate. We should get Galatea,” I said, focusing again on the woman on the ground.
“I tried to reach her already.”
“There is another Fate we can ask,” Horatia offered.
“But he’s not ready,” Bari said, shaking her head.
“What else can we do . . . ?” Horatia conceded, looking to Bari for another idea.
“South, I need you,” I whispered. I had told him not to listen to my thoughts anymore, but my guess was that he could still hear me.
I looked around, and then back down at the woman’s unconscious body.
I got closer and took her hand in mine. My instinct was to try a spell even though I knew it wouldn’t—couldn’t—work.
“What did she come in for?”
“We didn’t get that far. But it’s always either love, coin, or health.”
I was struck that Horatia could be so cavalier at a moment like this. I was comforted by another nervous twirl of her hair.
Bari, on the other hand, was focused. She knelt down beside me too.
“Who is she?” she demanded.
“A noblewoman named Sandrine. People are going to miss her soon,” Horatia replied.
I concentrated on Sandrine. I could hear her heart faintly beating, but I could also hear something else—what she wanted.
I want to find her . . . Where is she?
As I heard Sandrine’s wish, I got a flash of who she was looking for: one of the girls in the square.
“Hand me her bag.”
Inside was a cameo of a girl with brown hair. As I held it in my hands, I got a flash of where she was.
I tapped my wand to Sandrine’s forehead. I showed her what I was seeing: a group of soldiers accompanied by a hooded figure. My guess was that it was the Queen’s Witch Finder, whose face no one had ever seen. He and his men walked toward one of the Queendom’s many academies, just as I had seen a Witch Finder walk out of the Couterie over a year ago.
My vision flashed to the exterior of the school in town. It then flashed again on a pretty girl with brown curls that framed her face. She looked up from her notebook as if she had just come up with something brilliant. There was a crash, and a group of soldiers came through the academy doors. The kids scattered.
The girl I had focused on ran. I flashed again. She was in the Dark Wood, alongside her classmates. She was safe. Horatia wasn’t completely right about what humans wanted. There was something else that they wanted just as much as we did: family.
“It’s Sandrine’s daughter.”
I closed my eyes and tried to share what I had seen with Sandrine.
I looked down at the poor woman again. Her eyes fluttered open.
The air flickered around me. South was beside me.
“You needed me?”
“You’re late,” I said, half joking, half relieved.
He gave me a small smile as he took in the scene.
Sandrine, waking with heavy eyelids, looked at South with confusion.
“You were not there a second ago. What’s happening?” she asked blearily. “Is what I saw real?”
“I think so.”
Horatia leaned in. “Miss, are you okay?”
“I’m better than okay. Thank you so much,” she said, getting to her feet and rushing out of the open doorway.
“What did you do, Farrow?” Bari asked,
“I granted her wish.”
I looked beside me at Hecate’s ashes, which had siphoned themselves out of the pouch and were leaning in and watching our every move. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn my mother was a little proud of me. I had my mother’s approval, but I couldn’t help looking to Bari to see if she approved too. For the first time in our lives, I had done something that Bari couldn’t.
“Are you a healer now?” Horatia wanted to know. Healing was a rare gift, usually requiring more than one Entente, and even then it was not always possible.
“I thought your power was gone . . . ,” Ocenth marveled.
“It’s back. But it’s different than ours. How did you do it, Farrow?” Bari asked as the others peppered me with questions.
My eyes were on her as I explained. “There was a cameo of a girl. As I held it in my hands, I got a flash of where she was. It was Sandrine’s daughter. She ran off in one of the raids. Sandrine wanted to know that she was safe,” I said to the others.
Bari was impressed. She followed my explanation with animated interest. “And you showed her with your wand . . .”
“I think so.”
“When I was little, I used to throw out my wands and carve new ones for my new skills. It was such folly. It turns out that perhaps broken things are stronger than we imagined. Look at Farrow—even she doubted herself because her powers were gone—but power always finds a way. It may just be different than you think. It may be better . . . ,” Bari mused.
Before I could answer, South spoke. “I agree—all hail Farrow’s new gift. But why was her gift needed? How did that woman end up on the floor in the first place? That spindle—what is it really for?”
“A spindle spins thread,” Horatia deadpanned.
“But this one does something more, doesn’t it? Why did you spell it?” South pressed.
The irony had not escaped me either. Horatia could spin a dress with a single thought, but here she was with a spindle that could render someone unconscious with a single prick of their finger.
Behind Horatia there was a shadow. It grew and grew into something bigger. It looked almost like a dragon. I blinked hard and the shadow returned to the shape of a girl. I must have imagined it, but had I?
Horatia gave me a knowing gaze. “We are so much more powerful now . . . ,” she began.
“Horatia,” Bari said, not gently, as if to warn her off from what she was saying.
“Because of this place. Because you practice on humans,” South countered.
“Because we are free of all the old rules,” Horatia carried on, ignoring Bari.
But Bari took a gentler, more effective tack. She focused on Hecate’s ashes, which were still at my side. “The day of the Burning our servitude to the humans ended. Our unfortunate covenant with them burned in the fire along with your flesh. What happened to you, Hecate, should not have had to happen for us to be free of human rule. We are not there yet, but we are closer.”
Horatia and Ocenth looked to Hecate and nodded, their faces full of sympathy. I felt it too. Despite my reservations about my sisters, seeing them bond with Hecate erased some of my doubts. They were still my sisters. Hecate’s ashes returned to me and the pouch. But South was still on a single track.
“You still haven’t explained the spindle,” he said.
“It protects our Future. That’s all you need to know,” Bari countered firmly.
Everything my sisters were saying made sense. But something inside me was shifting, questioning. Something was unsettled, and I couldn’t push it down as much as I wanted to.
“Farrow?” Horatia prompted. “Where did you go?”
“Sorry, I’m right here.” I smiled wide and squeezed her shoulder, giving in to the part of myself that was just happy to see her and Bari in the same room with me after all these years. No matter that the room was a secret magic shop and not the Reverie. No matter that something had changed in all of us since we were girls together. Something sad and dark. But what mattered was that we were here.
A few seconds later Bari and South took my hands, and we landed back in South’s barn.
“You have to know everything we do keeps us all safe. You will know everything in time. I promise,” Bari said to both of us.
“Okay,” I said, relenting.
“I’m famished. Are you coming?” Bari proffered, already heading for the door.
“In a minute,” I said, catching a look from South. He had something he wasn’t saying.
“Well, hurry. We had Cinderella pick apples from the Dark Wood for a tart,” she added as she exited. As she left, I felt the gravity of her. Some part of me was still caught up in her wake.
“Cinderella!” I could hear Bari call a couple of seconds later, her voice full of impatience as she pushed open the door to the mansion.
“What?” I demanded from South, sensing his disapproval.
“You still look at her like you did when we were young.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You look at her like she’s got all the power. But the truth is, growing up back then, you had more magic than she did. You just didn’t know it yet.”
“That’s not true. She was already on her way to turning herself into a flock of birds.”
“She can make birds that last a few hours, and you gave me wings that I have to this day.”
I knew what he was getting at, but I resisted.
“It was a fluke. It’s not a competition, South. We aren’t kids anymore.” What I said felt like a lie. At this moment, standing here with South, but knowing that Bari was waiting for me back in the house, took me back to the Entente of our youth.
“I was never competing. I just wanted to belong.”
I felt my guilt punch me in the gut. I had been so focused on me and what I didn’t have, I had not thought about what South had lost—Iolanta. We’d been broken in the same ways. We’d lost our mothers. We’d lived without magic, only to have it thrust upon us. But I had years of dealing with the loss of Hecate, and in some ways, I hadn’t lost her at all. And South had discovered and lost his mother and found his magic in the same night.
“South . . . ,” I began.
“No more guilt, Farrow.”
I stifled it. “You said you were happy for us to all be back together.”
“I am.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I pressed. “Do you see something in their Presents that scares you?”
“I don’t see anything. That’s the problem. Why are they all being so careful to block me?”
“Maybe because you spent more of your life as human than Entente?”
“Ouch,” he said, pantomiming a wound to his heart.
“I didn’t mean it like that, South.”
“I know,” he said.
But the look on his face told me that my words had hurt him all the same.