.30.

A STAR-BRIGHT THREE SECONDS

“What are you looking at?” Quicksilver snapped at every scandalized expression tossed their way. “Don’t you have anything better to do? Careful, or I’ll wipe myself clean on your fancy dress!”

She stomped through the courtyards of King Kallin’s castle, which glowed in the moonslight—incandescent lilies, manicured walking paths lined with glowing blue and green moss, gauzy banners tied between shimmering white trees hung with tiny silver bells.

Getting past the soldiers guarding the castle grounds had been easy, with Quicksilver and Fox working together to distract them and slip back into the party. They hadn’t even needed to use magic. But that did nothing to cheer her up. She was cold, she was tired, and she was not looking forward to telling Sly Boots the news.

By the time they found him, chatting gaily away in a circle of laughing young people—witch and human alike—the mud coating Quicksilver and Anastazia had hardened into a shell of grime.

His eyes widened when he saw her. He jumped to his feet and hurried to her, leaving his new friends looking curious and confused.

“Quicksilver, what happened? Are you all right?” And then, before Quicksilver had a chance to berate him as she so longed to do—for talking to these beautiful people with normal noses, for leaving them to face those horrible skeletons all alone—Sly Boots yanked Quicksilver into an enormous, crushing hug.

Immediately Quicksilver’s eyes filled with unexpected tears. She allowed herself three seconds to stand there and be held, which was not a thing she had enjoyed much in her life. Then, just before she was ready to shove him away . . . he did it for her.

He stepped back, pushing her away slightly, and wrinkled his nose. “You smell terrible.”

Quicksilver stared at him, fuming. “Well, so would you, if you’d bothered to come with us!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, scratching his temple. There was a red mark on his skin; he must have been scratching that spot over and over. “I got . . . I was busy. I didn’t realize . . . so you’re not hurt, then?”

Quicksilver brushed off her sleeves, as if that would do any good at all. “No, I’m not, but—”

“And Anastazia, you’re all right?”

“As all right as all right can be,” Anastazia murmured absently, picking a clump of mud off her shoe and tossing it in her mouth.

A gawking lady nearby, her hair pulled into bunches of aquamarine netting, fainted dead away at the sight.

“Er . . . what’s wrong with Anastazia?” asked Sly Boots.

“Nothing,” said Quicksilver. “Well, something, but I don’t know what. Listen—”

“Did you find the skeleton?”

“Oh, we found skeletons, all right,” remarked Fox.

Sly Boots straightened. A smile tugged at his mouth. “Multiple skeletons?”

“The bad kind, unfortunately. Aren’t you sad to have missed out on all the fun?”

“Listen,” Quicksilver snapped, so fiercely that even Fox looked startled. Flushing, she opened her pack so Sly Boots could see what was missing. “I’m sorry,” she told him, “but everything’s gone. Our food, our money. The medicine for your parents. I thought you should know.”

Sly Boots’s expression froze, and then fell, and then turned flat and hard. A strange light flickered through his eyes, and was gone.

“I didn’t mean to lose it all,” said Quicksilver. “We went into the catacombs, and at first everything was fine, but then all the dead people came to life. We tried to get out, but everything was spelled to keep them in. The skeletons, I mean. There were steps that exploded into fire, everything was shaking—”

A shriek pierced the air. The crowd turned to see King Kallin, who had just come around the corner surrounded by his advisers. He stared in abject horror at Quicksilver.

“You there!” He pointed a trembling finger at Quicksilver. “Did you say . . . did you say something about skeletons?” He took one unsteady step toward her. “So it’s true, then? They’re . . . alive?”

Queen Voina stalked forward. “Oh, help us all, I’ll never get him to sleep now. Mud girl! Come here at once! Tatjana, is this a friend of yours?”

A giggling Princess Tatjana came forward with a group of her ladies-in-waiting, all of them clothed in shimmering gowns of pearl and peach and cornflower blue. The princess squinted and then recoiled. “I’ve never seen that girl before in my life. If it is a girl, that is. I can’t quite tell!”

The ladies-in-waiting burst into peals of laughter. Quicksilver stood seething, her muddy hands clenched into fists.

Fox sighed. I guess the party’s over, then?

Hide us, Quicksilver thought to him, and an instant later, Fox cloaked them in a vaporous veil, and they ran.

Behind them, the crowd shouted in dismay, and King Kallin dissolved into hysterics. Quicksilver glanced at Sly Boots’s hard, quiet face and wished, for a terrible, aching moment, that they could go back to that star-bright three seconds in which the only thing she knew was how it felt to be hugged by a friend.

Quicksilver plopped herself down on a log and flipped furiously through Anastazia’s journal.

The spot they had found to make camp for the night was a good three miles from King Kallin’s castle, in a copse of trees that stood between downy hills. From their camp, the castle and the lines of lights stretching across the surrounding bridges looked like child’s toys.

Sly Boots immediately set to work tending to Anastazia’s and Quicksilver’s wounds as best he could, but his movements were rough and hurried. He soaked a ripped section of Quicksilver’s skirt in the creek nearby and used it to clean the rawest patches of skin. Each time the cloth scraped too hard, Quicksilver gritted her teeth but said nothing. Sly Boots ground up moxbane flowers with a rock and sprinkled the pieces of petals onto the cuts on Quicksilver’s right arm, then ripped the sash from his vest and used that as a makeshift bandage. He tied it far too tightly, and Quicksilver yanked her arm away.

“Thanks very much, but I’m fine,” she ground out.

His eyes narrowed; he said nothing.

Quicksilver looked away, back to the journal in her hands. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to understand any of this. Her handwriting looks like some chipmunk popped out of a tree and decided to give it a go.”

“Give that here.” Sly Boots snatched the journal out of her hands so roughly that a page sliced her palm.

Quicksilver watched him, a sudden coldness gripping her insides. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with her?”

Anastazia lay in the grass, pulling radiant chartreuse flowers off a low-hanging branch. “I am,” she said dreamily with each plucked petal, “I am not. I am. I am not.” She paused, considering, and stared at Quicksilver. “Are you?”

Quicksilver ignored her. “If you’re angry, you should just say it.”

“Oh, are you telling me what to do again?” asked Sly Boots. “What a surprise.”

“I’m telling you to stop being a dung head and talk straightforward-like!”

Sly Boots threw the journal into the weeds. “Fine. I’ll talk straightforward-like. How could you lose that medicine, Quicksilver? How?”

Quicksilver retrieved the journal and shook flowers loose from its pages. Clumps of pollen left glowing pink smears behind. “I told you, it was an accident! And don’t you dare throw around Anastazia’s journal like it’s some piece of trash. Don’t you know what this is?”

“It’s a book full of a silly old woman’s mad ramblings.”

Anastazia nodded to herself. “Well, that’s rather the truth.”

“Now, Anastazia, listen to my voice,” said Fox reasonably, dusting flowers from her hair. “You’re fine, aren’t you? You’ve just had a hard few days, but you’ll be good as new after some more rest, eh?”

“She’s not a silly old woman,” Quicksilver shouted.

Sly Boots started pacing, his hands in fists. “You used to call her that yourself!”

“Sometimes I say things I don’t mean!”

“Like how you promised you would learn time-traveling magic and get my parents medicine and get me back home as soon as you could? Like when you said that? Did you not mean that either?”

“Look, I’m doing the best I can. You know we have to find the skeletons first. It’s important, Boots. You saw what happened with the Wolf King. You saw how dangerous he is!”

“Ah! Ah. So you’re saying your witch friends are more important than me and my parents?”

“I’m saying that if I can stop the Wolf King—and I can, I know I can—then I must. And I have to concentrate on that before anything else! Think about it, Boots—there are thousands of witches in trouble, compared to your two parents. Besides, I don’t know why you’re so upset. We’ll just go get some more medicine! I’ve stolen before, and I’ll steal again.”

“But before we do that, we need to move on,” said Fox. “If we go back into town, someone might recognize us as the—if you’ll pardon me—mud-covered mad people from the party. There could be questions.”

“We’ll find another apothecary down the road, Boots,” Quicksilver said. “I promise. I’ve always promised to help you. That hasn’t changed.”

Sly Boots laughed harshly. “So you say. It’s good to know what you think is important and what isn’t. Bones first, everything else second. You’ve made that very clear. I like how your precious skeletons made it through the catacombs safe and sound. But you couldn’t take a second to make sure my parents’ medicine was safe too?”

“We were running for our lives! I told you, I’m trying my best!”

“Well, that’s obviously not good enough.”

Quicksilver stepped back as if she’d been slapped. “You were the one who went wandering off into that party like a besotted fool, leaving us to fight an army of skeletons by ourselves!”

Sly Boots, looking taller and more solid than he ever had before, marched up to Quicksilver. The shadows moving across his face drew strange shapes, and his eyes sparked like fire. “Well, maybe I wanted to spend time with some nice, normal people for once! People who are kind and pretty and actually like me. Is that so horrible?”

Quicksilver stopped in her tracks, her arms going stiff at her sides.

Fox turned slowly, growling.

Sly Boots paled. The strange light in his eyes faded, and he seemed himself again—long arms and long legs and soft, candle-colored hair. A boy dressed up in fancy clothes that didn’t fit quite right.

“Quicksilver,” he said softly, “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did. You meant every word. I told you to speak your mind, and you did, and I thank you for that. Now I know how you really feel, and there’s no more confusion.” Quicksilver returned to the log, opened the journal, and sat facing away from them all. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep looking for a way to help my friend.”

Quicksilver heard Sly Boots take a few steps toward her and stop. She waited, breathing carefully, as he moved about the clearing, and when she turned around at last, she found that he was gone.

Oh, Fox, Quicksilver thought, hating the sound of her own pitiful voice.

Fox said nothing and instead lay on her feet, for her thin dancing boots were wet and worn through, and her toes were icy cold. She read the journal until she could no longer see the words, hoping she might find a spell that could cut away the hurting pieces of her heart, and replace them with pieces made out of stone.

Sly Boots returned in the quiet night hours when the moons were bright as coins, but Quicksilver could not be bothered with him.

“I’ve found something,” she whispered to Anastazia, settling beside her in a patch of clover that shifted in color from pale peach to deep violet at her touch. “Sit up, won’t you?”

Anastazia, her hands folded across her stomach, did not move from where she lay in the clover. Her tattered ball gown seemed more ridiculous and ill fitting now than ever. Quicksilver removed Anastazia’s cloak from her pack. It had folded down, most marvelously, into a square the size of her fingernail, which was a spell Anastazia had promised to teach her someday—if, that is, she could still remember it. Quicksilver unfolded the cloak and arranged it over Anastazia’s body, tucking it close about her.

Anastazia raised a questioning eyebrow.

“That dress simply isn’t your color,” Quicksilver said.

“I see.”

“As I was saying, I think I’ve found something in here.” Quicksilver held up the journal. “Look at this—”

“I’ve failed you.”

Quicksilver frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I thought this would be it. That this would be the time we would beat him. You and me, after all the other yous and mes. And yet . . . I can feel it happening, Quicksilver. I can feel my mind slipping away from me like books piled too high on a shelf. Teetering, swaying, falling . . .”

Anastazia closed her eyes, her mouth twisting. “I should never have let us tag along with that . . . that boy and his delusional followers.”

“Olli?”

“Yes. Olli.” Anastazia batted her eyelashes.

Quicksilver heard Sly Boots shift in the grass behind them and wished he would go stomp off and sulk some more. The night was too quiet; she did not want him to hear.

“If we had gone our own way, we might have been able to avoid the . . .” Anastazia’s mouth pursed.

“The Wolf King?” Quicksilver suggested.

“It was too soon for you to meet him! You know hardly anything at all. I haven’t had time to teach you.”

“You’ve taught me quite a lot.”

“Pah! Not nearly enough. We will need so much more to defeat him.”

Quicksilver bristled. “I did use mind magic, you know. That’s not impressive?”

“You didn’t know what you were doing! It was an accident, Quicksilver, and if you were to try it again, it might hurt you, or worse. You could have died, all because I didn’t prepare you properly. And if you die, then I’m all alone. And even if I manage to survive long enough to find another you, in the future, I’ve no Fox to send you back in time. . . .” Anastazia rubbed her temples. In the moonslight, her skin was pure white, her wrinkles canyons carved into clay. “I’ll fail you. I’ll fail all of us.”

“Nonsense. You are me, and I don’t fail at anything. I’m the best thief in all the Star Lands, don’t you remember?” The words felt strange on Quicksilver’s tongue. She used to utter them with pride, and now they felt pale and small in the face of everything else. “And someday I’ll be the best witch. I mean, we’ve already got two skeletons, haven’t we? What’s five more? That’s nothing for you and me, is it, Fox?”

“Easy as finding sticks in a forest,” said Fox promptly.

“See there?”

Anastazia smiled up at Quicksilver. She pressed Quicksilver’s hand between her own. “I remember that young heart, how it felt to know my own strength, no matter what anyone said.” Anastazia cupped Quicksilver’s cheek. “I didn’t think I would like meeting you, you know. I thought you would be endlessly frustrating. I remember myself, after all. But now . . .”

The soft, gooey look in Anastazia’s eyes made Quicksilver squirm. “Yes, I’m sure we’re all very much in love with ourselves. Now, look at this.”

Quicksilver held open the journal to a page that included a list of scratched-out words and sketches of symbols—half-moons, ocean waves, a crossroads.

“Runes?” Anastazia asked, puzzled. “You’re not that advanced yet, my dear.”

“No. This.” Quicksilver pointed to two words circled some fifty-odd times with black ink: COLLECTIVE MAGIC.

Anastazia’s face became a web of hard lines. “That’s nothing,” she said, and she tore the page out of the journal before Quicksilver could stop her. “A foolish idea from one of our past selves, who was obviously too naive to know better. Never trust a witch. Didn’t I tell you? We can only trust ourselves.” She ripped the page into scraps and then turned away, hugging herself. “Don’t make me,” she said, in a soft, girlish voice. “I don’t want to go there.”

Quicksilver settled down in the clover beside Anastazia, wrapping her arms about her and squeezing tight.

She would not forget this idea of collective magic, no matter what Anastazia said about it. She had read the page so many times that she knew the words written on it by heart:

ONE CAN BE STRONG.

A FEW CAN BE STRONGER.

MANY WILL BE MIGHTY.