Holly did not tell. Kami was the one who led the way into the Water Rising, and collected up everyone she could. They all ended up sitting in the parlor: Holly, Ash, Jared, Rusty, Lillian, and Jon. Even Kami’s brothers were there, sitting on the floor.
Even Martha Wright was there.
Kami had stopped at the bar and asked if she wanted to come hear something new. “I wish you would,” Kami had added.
Martha Wright had hesitated, and Kami had been briefly sure she would not do it. Then she had said, with sudden decision, “I’ll come and listen, at least,” and called for her husband to come work behind the bar.
The inn was empty, anyway. There was no sound of customers, no sound in the streets outside the windows. Kami repeated all that she could remember from the letter: all of the parts she had decided would be useful.
She told them that if a source and two sorcerers went to the Crying Pools, and the sorcerers were linked, and one source and sorcerer were linked, a link could be made between all three of them. She told them the conditions that Elinor Lynburn had outlined. She told them of how much power they could gain: perhaps enough to defeat Rob Lynburn, enough to save the town.
Enough to save her mother.
She did not tell them of the death and ruin Elinor Lynburn had warned would follow.
“Wait a second,” said Ash. “How is there a ‘moon in springtime before the start of the new year’? I think it’s a riddle. It makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does,” said Jared. “The new year was in March in England until the 1700s, when the pope introduced a new calendar.”
Everyone stared at him. Jared flushed slightly, scar thrown into relief, and muttered, “I read a lot of old books.”
“Well done,” said Jon. “See where learning gets you, lads? So much better than messing around with girls or playing those video games which one hears are full of violence.”
Kami, as a witness to many of her father’s video game marathons, gave him a long judgmental stare. “You total hypocrite.”
“Hypocrisy is what being a parent is all about,” Jon said. “Well done for cracking the books, Jared and Holly. You see how it pays off.”
Holly smiled and the light of her smile seemed to spill all over the room, reflections of light refracted all over everywhere.
“It’s true reading is a wonderful thing,” Rusty observed. “I read a Cosmo a year ago, and I still remember how to keep my nails in perfect condition and also ten top tips on how to dress to accentuate my ass.”
Now everybody was staring at Rusty. Unlike Jared, he did not blush.
“Those tips are working,” he said. “Don’t pretend you haven’t all noticed. I know the truth.”
Kami rolled up a magazine on the table—sadly, for the sake of dramatic irony, not a Cosmo—and hit Rusty over the head with it. “Does anybody have anything else to say—I can’t stress this enough—specifically about Elinor Lynburn and medieval New Year?”
“Want to know what it was called? You’ll like this,” Jared added, and he looked at Kami. It was a simple glance from his gray eyes, but it felt like being put in a room that was just the two of them. “Lady Day.”
Kami beamed at him. “You know what I like, sugar-prune. So … Elinor Lynburn, Anne Lynburn, and Matthew Cooper went down to the lakes at night, sometime in March. That means the spring equinox, doesn’t it? That’s what it has to mean.”
“Those dates have power,” said Lillian. “That’s why Rob wants to sacrifice someone at or near the spring equinox: why he asked for the sacrifice he did not receive at the winter solstice.”
“He already sacrificed the mayor,” Rusty said. “And I never wanted to live in a world where I had to say that sentence, so thank you for that, Rob Lynburn. Can’t he be done with death for the year? He’s already got the house and the town has pledged their allegiance. What does he want all this power for?”
Lillian shrugged. “Why do we have to keep having this discussion?”
“Because something’s not right,” said Kami. “The way he’s behaving makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. What do people want love for? Why do people want more money than they could ever spend? Power becomes the measure of you, and you always want more. He wants to rule over the town, and for his rule to be unbreakable. He wants a death to be volunteered and not simply accepted. He wants the extra power that comes with a sacrifice done at one of the turnings of the year.”
There was a long pause.
“But what,” said Jared, “if that’s not true?”
Lillian looked frustrated enough to be angry. “I don’t understand.”
“Let him talk a minute,” said Martha Wright. Unbelievably, Lillian glanced at her and visibly checked herself.
“Rob said,” Jared said slowly, “before he put me down with Edmund Prescott, that I didn’t understand what he was really doing yet. And okay, I know Rusty’s right and it sounds just like the standard evil overlord speech, but I was talking to Rob in the garden once. He said that he never wanted to come back to this town.”
Jared glanced at Kami. She saw what he meant so clearly that it was like having the link back, having perfect understanding pass between them, for an instant.
“What if we got his plan wrong all along? What if he doesn’t want to rule Sorry-in-the-Vale?” Kami asked.
“Then what has he been doing all this time?” Lillian demanded, breaking silence with a violence that showed what an effort not speaking before had been.
Kami spoke quietly. “What if he wants to do a lot more to the town than rule it? What if he wants to make everyone his slaves—not just have people not saying no, but people not able to say no? Turning everybody into statues or trees, or … I don’t know …”
“You’re saying he wants to kill someone on the spring equinox so he can do something specific,” said Holly. She sounded convinced.
“So he can use that magic to exert his power over everybody. You guys—” Kami nodded to Lillian and Ash. “You taught us that if you have somebody’s possession, you can do a spell on them. That’s how we defend ourselves from the sorcerers. Rob insisted on his tokens of submission, and he got them. I saw people cutting locks of hair to give him myself. What could Rob do with tokens from the whole town, if he had the power from his equinox sacrifice as well?”
“I don’t know,” said Ash.
At the same time, Jared said grimly, “Nothing good.”
“So we have even more reason to go down to the lakes,” said Kami. “We have to perform the ceremony. Whatever Rob is planning, we have to stop him.”
She felt Ash in her mind suddenly, his curiosity like a friendly cat brushing up against her to see what she was doing.
“I can tell you how to do the ceremony,” said Lillian. “Rob and I did it together, when we were bound as Jared and Ash are now. It does make sense that if a source was there, the source could help. I suppose it even makes sense that the source’s power would be multiplied, and that would mean a source would have enough power to reforge a link that was broken—” Her eyes traveled from Kami to Jared. “And enough power to bind two sorcerers to her. Enough power to overcome the spell on Ash and Jared. Doing the ceremony when only Kami has any magic is going to be very risky, of course.”
There was a small line between Lillian Lynburn’s eyebrows. She wanted the plan to succeed, she wanted her town back safe and in her hands, but Lillian knew how magic worked. Kami could see the wheels in her mind turning, trying to see the catch.
There was a price for magic: it was taken from somewhere, life and death, earth and air. This was magic that involved their minds: this was magic so great that it might save the town, but Elinor Lynburn had said it would break their minds and kill them.
Elinor Lynburn had seen it happen. Elinor Lynburn knew what she was talking about.
“So we’re all agreed,” said Ash. “We’re going to do it.”
Kami felt a rush of gratitude toward him. He was the one person she couldn’t hide anything from, and she hadn’t asked him to keep her secret, the way she had asked Holly. He knew all that Elinor Lynburn had written, knew all that Kami knew. He didn’t have Kami’s motivation: his mother was not the one who needed saving. He felt her feelings, her fear and her determination, and she could feel his own fear, so different from hers that they hardly seemed like the same emotion. Ash’s fear often paralyzed him, but not this time. He wasn’t even hesitating.
They both wanted the same thing, wanted it enough so it felt like her own emotion was being mirrored back to her—they wanted to protect Jared.
Kami’s dad looked unhappy, a twist to his mouth as if he wanted to argue but was not sure how. Even now, Kami knew, he still didn’t understand how magic worked. He had a hard time believing a spell and the pools in the woods could actually be a threat to his daughter’s life. And he wanted Mum back as much as she did.
“So if I understand it, the plan is to lie in wait until the spring equinox,” he said. “And to make Rob Lynburn think that we’ve accepted that his way is the way things are going to be from now on. How do we do that?”
“Well …,” Martha Wright said hesitantly. She glanced at Jared, who was leaning forward and bending an attentive look upon her, and took heart. “We always hold a Christmas party at the Water Rising. We didn’t this year, on account of all the troubles. We could do it now, invite everyone. That might be a good signal to show people what they want to see: that we’ve all given up fighting and life’s going to be more normal from now on.”
Dad looked pleased. “Also a good time for Lenore to show people that she’s a better option than Rob.”
Lillian looked appalled at the thought of more socializing. Angela looked as if she agreed with Lillian but would rather develop insomnia than ever say she agreed with Lillian about anything. Martha looked delighted at how well her suggestion had been received. They all got up, the meeting over by silent consensus, the talk of magic dropped and the arrangements for a party on. It seemed like everybody had the same response that Martha had suggested the town would have: they were all delighted at the thought of some normalcy to talk about. Kami pushed her chair back, prepared to follow Angela and talk about party decorations, but before she reached the door, she heard her name, spoken quite softly.
She looked around at the only other person left in the room, and her hand fell away from the door handle.
“Whatever it is that you’re hiding from me,” said Jared, “you have to tell me now.”
He was standing with his back to the wall, and Kami knew that was how he stood when he wanted to feel safe, when he wanted to remove himself from the world. She had the impulse to go to him, slide an arm around his waist, kiss him, and not have this fight.
She moved, but not to cross the floor to be with him. Instead, she simply moved away from the door and placed one hand flat on the little coffee table. It shook because its legs were unbalanced, not because she was shaking.
“I’m not …,” she said. “I don’t want to hide anything from you.”
“Then don’t do it,” Jared said, and swallowed on the words, as if he was in pain. “I know I’m not—smart like you, but don’t lie to me just because you can do it now.”
“What?” Kami said, stricken. “Jared. Come on. You’re smart. You know I think you’re smart. I’ve told you that I think you’re smart.”
“Oh, sure,” said Jared. “Held back a year in school. Can’t do the simplest things that you and Ash and Angela can do. Can’t do anything but snap and snarl at people. I know you don’t think badly of me, but you do things like simplifying stuff for me when you tell me what you want to do at Cambridge.”
“What?” Kami asked, baffled, and then remembered telling Jared once that she wanted to study journalism at Cambridge, rather than explain taking literature and extra courses. “Because you’re American, and getting into the intricacies of my English college plans didn’t seem like the most fun conversation ever for you. Not because I think you’re stupid.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jared. “What matters is that I can tell you’re hiding something from me now.”
“Okay,” said Kami. “You’re right. I didn’t want to say in front of my dad and your aunt Lillian, but this spell has a really good chance of killing us, or at least some of us. But we’ve all risked our lives to stop these people before. It’s not any different because it’s magic we’re doing to ourselves instead of facing other sorcerers. You’ve done it, time and again. Rob could have killed you when you went after Ten. I thought he had. Any of us could have been killed in the battle before that. And I need to have enough power to save my mother. I won’t let anybody stop me.”
She gripped the edge of the table and looked at Jared. He was looking back at her, his head tipped back against the wall, his peculiar pale eyes full of light and her image.
“No,” he said. “You’re not … You’re still lying to me, and I don’t know why, but don’t,” Jared ground out, and it was almost a sound of anguish. “Please don’t.”
“It’s the truth,” Kami told him unsteadily.
“It’s not the whole truth,” Jared said. “I can tell. You know I can sense what Ash is feeling. I can’t read his thoughts but I can feel how he agrees with you, how you both want to—to shield me from something. I don’t want to be shielded. We might die, and that means we have to be honest with each other. This isn’t fair. If you thought I was protecting you by lying to you or stopping you from making your own decisions, you’d kill me. Don’t make me ask again, Kami. What are you hiding from me?”
It was the first time, Kami thought, that he’d acted like his feelings might be as important as hers, instead of lashing out when he was hurt because he could not think of any other way to say he was in pain and could not imagine his pain would matter to anyone. But his pain had always mattered to her and she did want to spare him. This felt too horrible to share, too heavy a burden to lay on him.
Only he was right. She would want the truth, no matter how terrible. She owed him the same respect she demanded from him.
“The spell killed Matthew Cooper and Anne Lynburn,” Kami confessed. “It killed …”
Jared stopped leaning against the wall. She usually found him hard to read, but she saw what he was thinking now so clearly. She felt his horror, like a shadow on her own heart.
“It killed the source, and his original sorcerer,” he finished for her. “The second sorcerer lived.”
He was suddenly in motion, but not toward her. He crossed the floor to the mantelpiece and leaned one elbow on it. Kami stared at the arch of his back, the way his every muscle was strained. She saw his face only in the mirror, and she did not want to see even that much.
“You and Ash die,” Jared said hoarsely. “I live.”
“We don’t know that’s what will happen,” Kami said.
“We only know it’s what Elinor Lynburn said would happen.”
“We might all live,” Kami said, and lower: “We might all die.”
“And you didn’t want to tell me, because you knew there was no chance in hell I would agree to anything like that,” Jared said. “There is no reward that could make that risk worthwhile.”
“We could be talking about the whole town,” said Kami. “We are talking about my mother.”
“This is your life!” Jared shouted.
“That’s right!” Kami shouted back at him. “It’s my life! I get to decide what to do with it! Don’t you dare act like my life means more to you than it does to me!”
She expected him to shout again, but he turned to face her. What little color there had been in his face was all drained away.
“I see you and Ash have already decided,” Jared said. “You’ll do the ceremony, with or without me. It could still kill you both, and unless I do it, it won’t save the town. That leaves me to be a monster or let you both be martyrs. I’d be a monster if I could stop you. I’d be glad to be a monster, if you were saved, but I don’t have a choice. I have to do it, and all I can hope is that I die too, that I don’t have to go on like Elinor Lynburn did with the town saved and nothing but death and silence in her head for the rest of her life.”
“I don’t want you to die,” Kami whispered.
It would be a comfort to think Jared would go on even if she did not, but she couldn’t trust him not to despair or do something desperate, wreck it all because he did not value himself or understand why anyone else would value him. It turned everything that should have been comfort into fear.
But he had seen quickly that she and Ash were determined, had worked it out from Ash’s feelings and her face. Maybe she could trust him, to try to survive even if he did not want to and he would have to do it without them. Maybe she should not have kept it from him. Maybe it would be all right.
“I can’t do this,” Jared said abruptly.
He left the mantelpiece now and came toward her. She took that as an encouraging sign. She watched him, and tried to make a bargain with herself: if he took four steps to her, she could go to him.
Or even three.
“We all have to do it,” Kami told him. “I know it’s hard, but I really think that it’s the only way.”
“No,” said Jared. “I don’t mean that. I mean this. I mean us.”
Kami looked at him. He looked back: he looked serious, as if one thing had something to do with the other, as if that made sense to him. As if the thought they could all die soon meant he could not bear the idea of being with her in the time they had left.
“What?” Kami said at last, and heard her voice come out weak in her own ears. “You’re punishing me for making my own decision, is that it?”
“I’m not punishing you,” said Jared. “It’s not like I’m any kind of prize. The whole idea was ridiculous and pathetic anyway. I never agreed to it. You decided it all.”
That was true, but she had never expected him to say it. It was all the secret uncertainties she had ever had, all the insecurities she had told herself were stupid. But maybe she’d been the one who was stupid. She swallowed and looked at him. He looked back at her, his gray eyes serious and intent. He didn’t even look angry. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, like he had once before. He was just telling the truth.
“When someone else will always know everything about you, when someone else will share your feelings and know your secrets in a way I never will, we can’t be together.”
“We could try,” Kami argued, and she wanted to argue more but found her mouth, for once, empty of all words.
She had been trying not to think about it, because when she did think about it—about Ash begging them to stop and about the way she found herself always sharing secrets and smiling with Ash—she knew Jared was right. She had known all along that it was impossible, but she had hoped and she had wanted and tried, and she had thought that if he did too, there might somehow still be hope.
“If you want to be with me …,” Kami said, and hesitated. If a miracle happened, if they all survived and she and Ash broke the link, then what? But she didn’t think they were going to survive.
And she had never been sure of exactly what she meant to Jared, beyond the link and his memory of the link. She didn’t want to hear that her link with Ash meant Jared wouldn’t want her, ever. She was going to die. She didn’t want to have the memory of asking him to be with her, and having him say no.
But he said it just the same.
“Kami,” Jared told her, and he sounded sad. “I can’t keep pretending. I don’t want to.”
“Right,” Kami said. She’d thought her voice would be faint but it came out strong then and furiously, irrationally angry. “Fine. Forget it. But we’re doing the ceremony.”
She banged the door as she walked out. She felt sick with how unfair this was, as unfair as the choice she had had to make and the spell they would have to cast. She had never wanted love, the kind of love her childhood group of girlfriends had dreamed of, something that would cause her life to make sense. Her life had made sense already. It had seemed silly, all the clichés of being completed, of wild despair or transcendent joy, love at first sight or ever after, certainties when she had never been certain about anything but how much he mattered. It still seemed so far removed from the desolate pain she was feeling now. She had wanted university, and journalism. She’d thought that she was smart about life and about love.
She’d had Jared already, had him all along and wanted no one else. She’d had him and she’d lost him, and she had spent all this time scrambling to convince herself that she had not lost him, not really.
Nobody could tell a love story by themselves: people told love stories to each other, and Jared had refused to tell her what she had been hoping to hear.
Jared was right. Now when they might be about to die, it was time to be honest, time to admit the stark truth to herself. He didn’t want her. She had lost him.