We used South’s power of the Present to locate Maggie, and his wish brought us to an alleyway near the square. South tapped my face with his wand and then his own. He tapped my dress, and it became a soldier’s uniform.
The Queen had upgraded the theater, and there was an audience. Three girls stood in front of three tanks of water. It was just as the prince had described it, only that much worse. She had made trying witches into a performance for the people’s enjoyment and terror.
Maybe this was a mistake, I thought. It was so public. My magic was only half back and unlike any other Entente’s, and South’s was so new and painful to him still. There were too many people.
I had been to the square before when there was a burning, making sure that Magrit had not indeed found one of us, even though I had been so sure then that the rest of the Entente were dead. But I had always turned back and rushed home to the Couterie before the pyre was struck with flame.
“Trust your first instinct, Farrow,” South said softly, reading me.
I lifted up my chin and focused on the girls. I hoped South and Cinderella were both right.
South indicated in a whisper, “Maggie’s on the right.” He knew from his vision of her.
We both looked on in silence. South’s wings twitched beneath his jacket. I tapped my fingers along the wand in my pocket.
“We have to release all of them,” South whispered again, his voice full of emotion.
He was still in my head, even if he was trying not to be. He knew I thought about just saving Maggie alone before I thought of saving the other girls.
“If we do, the Queen’s guards will redouble their efforts to find the Entente.”
“That’s him. The Witch Finder,” South said.
The man was wearing a mask. He was looking at the row of girls.
“We have to save them all,” South said without pause. His body went even more rigid. His features tensed too. He was in soldier mode.
He was right, of course. But releasing one girl would spark some embers of suspicion; releasing them all might be a fire we could not put out.
“If we do this, we prove that magic exists in the Present.”
“That ship sailed long ago,” South said. “Iolanta already did that back at the palace.”
“But this is a little more public than that.” After breaking Iolanta out of the palace, the Entente were more real than ever to the guards and the royals. But we were still just a story to the people, except for those who had witnessed the Burning all those years ago.
“We can’t let these girls die. Especially not in the name of magic.”
I was on a dangerous road. Before, all paths led to vengeance. Now, South threatened to drag me back to the Past when the Entente believed in humans. When we wanted nothing more than to please them, only to be rewarded with ashes.
The Witch Finder made each girl step forward. He filled their pockets with Black Glass.
I stared a second more at the girls’ scared faces. I thought of Hecate’s when she’d stood on the pyre in the square once upon a time.
“Look at them; think of how Hecate felt—being there when she had done nothing wrong.”
I didn’t respond, though his words cut to the quick. South grew quiet beside me, but there was tension in his stillness. He was a coiled spring, ready to attack. He was going to try and save the girls with or without me. He wasn’t judging me; he was trying to pull me back to those old lessons from the Fates. The ones that said we should help humans, even when they never helped us.
Finally I said, “I am going to regret this.”
He hesitated.
“Is it too much, all the Presents?” I asked.
South shook his head.
“Liar.”
“There’s no time for hesitation,” he said, more to himself than to me, but his wand shook when he raised it.
The Witch Finder said, “If you float, you are a witch. If you don’t, you’re true.”
A soldier behind him laughed and added, “True and blue.”
The girls shivered in fear. But one, a tiny brunette with curly hair, spat at the soldiers.
And then they were in the water.
“On three. I’ll hold back the soldiers and you get the girls. I’ll wish them safe,” South added.
I could hear the girls’ wishes over South’s. They wished for air. They wished for their mothers, and finally they wished for it all to stop. And when they did, I got an idea.
Hecate’s words came back to me: With enough will and enough magic, anything is possible. The words were no longer my own. They belonged to the wisher, but the result just might be the same.
South had begun counting.
“One, two . . .” When he reached three, I closed my eyes, grabbed his hand, and granted the girls’ wishes. And when I opened my eyes again, everything and everyone was still, except South and me.
“Farrow. How did you . . . ?”
“I granted their wishes,” I explained as South looked around, taking in the still town. “For it to all stop. We have to hurry. I don’t know how long I can hold this.”
Time stopped for me as it had for Hecate in the palace all those years ago. Every person had stopped moving mid-action. The Witch Finder’s mouth was open in a threat. The guards’ mouths were open in apparent laughter. The crowd was stuck in fear and awe of the spectacle, and the girls in the tank were frozen in agony. But after a couple of seconds ticked by, bubbles began to float up from their mouths and noses. I had given them breath just as they’d wished for.
“Help me get the girls out of the tanks,” I ordered.
“Hold on to me,” South said. He flew us to the tanks and set me down beside them. We pulled each girl out and laid them on the ground. They still appeared unconscious. They were blue and ashen from the water. Looking at their still forms, I felt the panic begin to rise in me. What if they didn’t wake? But we had to move them before we could wake them or the Witch Finder would make sure they never woke at all.
“We have to get them away from here.”
“Take their hands,” South ordered.
And I complied.
He closed his eyes, whispered a travel spell, and we were suddenly on the edge of the Dark Wood. The girls coughed themselves awake.
The girl who had spat spoke first. “We’re alive. How did we survive? What happened?” she asked.
“There isn’t much time. You have to go, and you cannot return until the Queen is dead. Do you understand?” I demanded.
“Are you Entente?”
“Who we are doesn’t matter. Who they think you are does. You will now be hunted as if you are Entente. I am sorry for that. But there was no other way.”
South was gentler when he spoke to them. “She speaks the truth. You can never come back here. At least not until the Queen is gone.”
The girls nodded. Another one of them spoke.
“We were told that you wanted to hurt us. But that’s just another of the Queen’s lies, isn’t it?”
South stepped in. “The Entente have always loved and will always love the people.”
“I’m Portia. Who are you?” she said, and she offered her hand in thanks.
Maggie and the other girl echoed their thanks.
“I’m—” I stopped short of telling her my name. “I am happy to have helped.”
South and I equipped them with new faces that would hopefully last till moonrise. Tucked in their pockets was some honeybread and cheese, and South handed Maggie a tiny, lighted, and enchanted compass that would guide their path. Then they made their way farther into the Dark Wood in the direction of the Thirteenth Queendom.
South turned to me after they had all disappeared. He said in wonder, “Did you know that you could do that?”
“Which part?”
“The part where you put the whole Queendom, maybe the whole world, to sleep. How on earth did you do that?”
“It wasn’t to sleep exactly. I would say, more like frozen in time . . . ,” I countered.
“Farrow . . .”
“Okay, I didn’t think it would work, but I had to try. I thought of Hecate on the pyre. I did what I wished I could have then. I stopped the world just long enough to save them. At least I could save them.”
South’s eyes filled with emotion. I wasn’t sure if he was thinking of Iolanta or Hecate or both.
“Maybe that’s the beauty of your gift. Galatea can’t see you grant a wish,” he said with a rueful grin.
“Or maybe Galatea will be waiting to drown us herself when we get back to the manor,” I quipped. But I was smiling too when I said it.
When we got back to the barn, South and I stood close together, our hearts and minds pulsing with the nervous beat of what we had just done.
“We really rescued them . . . ,” I said, marveling at how we’d saved the girls.
“You did it—I wonder what else you can do,” he said brightly. But then South’s face fell. “There’s something I should have told you back there . . . ,” he began haltingly.
“What?”
“There is no such thing as a Witch Finder.”
“What do you mean? I saw him with my own eyes.”
“It was the Queen’s idea. She wanted to keep magic alive, since all the Entente were supposed to be dead.”
It was as brilliant as it was demented. Queen Magrit had used the Entente as the excuse and a common enemy that the other Queendoms needed to rally against. And with the Entente presumably extinguished, she had to continue finding more of us.
“So she made up a magical detector?”
“No, I think there is a real one. But she uses a decoy to keep him or her safe. They pass the honor to each of the guards. They round people up and find magic all over the Queendoms.”
“How do you know this? Could you see the real Witch Finder’s Present?”
“Wherever the real Witch Finder is, he or she is cloaked in magic.”
“Then how do you know about the decoys?”
“Because I was a guard,” he said.
South had told me that he was more mascot than soldier. I had been prepared to do horrible things to get to the Queen. Had South had a similar dilemma?
“South, if you did things as a soldier . . . All that matters is that we ended up together. Whatever we had to do to get here, we had to do. Everything we did brought us here. Brought us back to each other so that we can defeat Magrit together.”
“I never hurt anyone. But I had heard rumors about what the Witch Finder did. Today I saw the truth.”
“You saved those girls today.”
“What about the ones I didn’t?”
“When the Queen is gone, you’ll be saving all of us.”
South put his chin up. “We’re really going to get her finally.”
I nodded.
He smiled down at me. His wing created shade that somehow felt comforting to me.
“I feel like we’ve already won. We have each other back. There’s part of me that doesn’t want to risk it,” South said. “When we go after her, what if we lose what we’ve found?”
I shook my head and recoiled from him. “As long as she’s alive, Magrit will come for us. As long as she’s alive, we don’t have peace. And neither does Hecate.”
South opened his mouth to take the words back. But before he could, we heard a loud squawking sound coming from inside the manor.
What now?