He’d lied to Kami.
Jared had been careful not to say anything to her that wasn’t true, but he had left her with a false impression about where he was going to be and what he was going to do, and that was as good as lying.
He didn’t know how much time he would have before someone noticed he was missing. He was hoping it would be all night, but he couldn’t count on that.
So there was no excuse for him to be standing in the dark of the High Street, looking in through the window. It made no sense. He was going to get caught.
It was strange and terrifying, being able to lie to Kami. He’d been so sure, when he lied to her last time and told her she was nothing special, that she could see right through him.
This time he knew she’d believed what he had wanted her to believe.
He hoped that he had helped her feel better: it was a selfish and awful hope. He should just want her to feel better without caring who was responsible for it. He did want that, wanted her happy, but he could not untangle that from wanting to be the cause of her happiness.
He did not know where that left him, except standing in the dark, staring in at her.
The pocket shutters that folded into the window casements were spread out but still hanging open so a large slice of the room showed, a white wall painted over with warm yellow light, a shadowed angle where the wall and ceiling met. Angela and Holly were on their feet, a blur of swinging hair and long legs in his way. Angela returned to the sofa and Rusty, and Holly followed her, and finally Jared could see.
She was sitting by the fire, turned away from the window. Turned toward Ash, leaning in his direction. The swing of hair that was just one brown shade away from black had come untucked from behind her ear, casting a shadow on her gold-touched skin, against the curve of her jaw.
She was smiling. Her mouth was almost always a slight curve, and though her smile was shadowed today it was still the brightest thing in the room. She was like that, always: the vivid point in every room. He thought that was why he had never been able to truly believe she was imaginary.
She had always seemed like the real one. She would be all right. He’d told her that, and he’d meant it. She’d get her town back, and put her family back together.
And the last link between them was broken now: the last couple of days between them did not matter anymore. She’d felt still tied to him because he was the only one she had been tied to, but now she was tied to Ash. The link was new, but Jared knew what it would become.
Ash was a good person. He would do the right thing for her, be what she wanted, not helplessly want to make too many demands.
Jared could be nothing to her now: Kami was free of him at last.
He looked in the window for one instant longer, even though he knew there was no way to memorize her. She was always changing, not like other girls, who looked like pictures. She was more like a river, all constant motion.
There was never going to be a time when he could think, Yes, all right, enough. So he turned away, because he had to, and turned to Aurimere.
It was easy to see in the dark. The flames around it were still burning.
By the time he was halfway up the hill, the heat of the fire felt as if it was scorching Jared’s skin. Standing on the crest of the hill looking into the flames, he could barely see Aurimere at all. The house was hidden by fierce light, the fire crackling like harsh laughter.
Sweat stung at his hairline, burned in his eyes like tears. There was no way through the fire. Unless you were a sorcerer.
Jared concentrated on the fire the way Ash had taught him. It felt different from regular fire, like running your hand over a tire and knowing it had been mended. Magic had been used recklessly to make it. He could put this whole fire out now, and Sorry-in-the-Vale would be glad.
He didn’t. Somebody in Aurimere would be bound to notice. He created an opening for himself, like pushing a door ajar. A shadow fell across the fire and he walked in it, through to the other side.
Once inside the fire, he could see Aurimere, the sheer walls turned silver in the moonlight. There were yellow lights in the windows.
There were invaders in Aurimere.
Jared asked the night to cover him, and it did, loaning him a little of its darkness and wrapping him in shadows so that when he passed by windows all the people inside saw was night. He moved around to the garden, the crumbling wall where he and Kami had talked once, and found the back door under one of the eaves, the one that had a door handle shaped like an iron hand. The small hand, fingers curved, was moon-silvered and moonshine-cold against his fingers. He felt as if there was a cool press on his hand for a moment, before he released the handle and slipped in the door.
The corridor was shadowy, the only lights coming from somewhere up the stairs and far away. Jared was glad: he didn’t want to see Aurimere overrun, not all at once.
He tried to walk softly, because the high ceilings and stone of Aurimere carried echoes.
He remembered how alien it had seemed, this echoing chilly place, when he’d first come. But he’d missed it while he was living in the Water Rising. He hadn’t realized Aurimere meant something to him until he found how much he hated having it taken away.
Maybe it was just that, chilly and strange as it was, it reminded him of Aunt Lillian.
He couldn’t lie to himself. This mission wasn’t just for Kami. He was coming to get Ten, but he wanted to save Aunt Lillian as well.
Aunt Lillian had stolen away Kami’s little brother, like an evil sorcerer in a fairy tale, as if a sorcerer had to be something the whole town was afraid of. As if his family hadn’t done enough to Kami’s family already.
Aunt Lillian had more than proven Kami’s mother’s point. No wonder Claire Glass wanted her daughter to stay away from him.
And Jared still wanted to save her. Maybe to save her so he could murder her himself, he was that furious with her. But he remembered the night he had moved back into Aurimere, when he had woken to a feeling like someone stroking his hair, very lightly so he would not wake. Except that if you slept on the streets for any length of time, you learned to always wake when someone was touching you.
He hadn’t woken fast, or in alarm. It was like he knew even in his sleep that he was safe, that he was being watched over, and that meant he stirred more slowly than he would have usually.
That gave whoever it was time so that when Jared opened his eyes and lifted himself from his pillow, all he saw was a crack of light made by the not-quite-closed door.
Maybe he had not quite closed the door himself when he was going to bed. Maybe it was just a lingering remnant of a dream about family, turned into a memory by his sleepy mind and wishful thinking, and nothing real at all.
He was still going to get Aunt Lillian out.
Aurimere had no place to keep prisoners: no dungeons or crypts to use in a pinch. Jared’s guess was that Rob would’ve put his wife in her room and sealed the door.
He slipped up the stairs by the library, past the marble bust of a Lynburn, silent as a shadow. The night was still wrapped around him, a kind cloak, though glints of moonlight off furniture and glass tore at it.
He reached the second floor, crossed to the wing where Aunt Lillian’s room was, and had to flatten himself against a wall as two sorcerers ran by. They rushed heedlessly past where he stood in the shadows, shoes clattering on the marble floor: one was a girl who looked younger than he was, hardly more than a child. Her face was familiar, as if he’d seen her in school.
Jared felt the shadows cling to him as he left the corner, the night of Sorry-in-the-Vale telling him that he could not remain hidden long.
He paused and looked at himself in a mirror as he passed down the hall: it had an ornate gold frame and the glass was speckled. His face faded in and out of vision, his hair a gleam in the dark. He looked like the ghost of a Lynburn, still walking Aurimere’s halls.
There was a little table below the mirror, with a lamp on it. The lampshade was fringed with points that glowed in the moonlight. Jared’s eyes went to their light: they were seed pearls. Seed pearls, caught in the hollow of paws belonging to some very small animal. The lampshade was hung with paws and pearls.
This crazy house, Jared thought, and almost smiled.
His quiet progress down the hall was stopped when he came in sight of Aunt Lillian’s door and saw his guess had been right.
The door was closed. He couldn’t see Aunt Lillian.
But he could see his mother, standing in front of the door. She was looking at it as if there was some riddle inscribed on the dark wood, as though if only she could make out what it said, she would know what to do and how they could all be happy.
Jared didn’t know if she was a guard, or if she had simply come to visit her sister. But he remembered that once she had protected Aunt Lillian from Rob. Once, she had even protected him.
She stood hesitating and trembling in front of the door, her streaming hair a cascade of moonshine. Jared wondered how long she had been there; it could have been hours.
He walked softly until he was standing very close to her.
Then he pulled the shadows away so they were standing face to face.
Jared smiled at her, baring his teeth. “Hi, Mom.”
His mother started backward in surprise and hit the wall, holding up a hand as if to ward him off. It made him sick to see her flinch, always had, but this time Jared bit his lip and looked away, and did not back down. Her intake of breath was shuddering and sharp, echoing in the hallway louder than her whisper: “What are you doing here?”
“I missed you,” Jared said. “Come on. What do you think?”
His mother pressed her hands together briefly, as if she had to pray for an instant. “If you go to Rob, he’ll forgive you. He wants you.”
“Is that what you want?” Jared asked.
His mother’s hand fluttered to her throat, a gesture reminiscent of a bird startled out of a tree. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I don’t,” his mother said, sharply. “I don’t—hate you.”
“Well, you don’t want me around, do you?” Jared asked. His mother looked at him in the same blank way as she had looked at the door, as if he was a riddle she could not figure out and had given up trying. “And you certainly don’t want Aunt Lillian around, do you?”
“Lillian’s my sister,” Mom snapped, claiming Aunt Lillian apparently as easy as claiming Jared was impossible. “I don’t want her hurt. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her at all.”
Jared felt his lip curl. “But you want her husband.”
“He was mine first!” Jared’s mother said. “He came to me, all through our childhood. I was the one he told about my parents killing his. I was the one he told about his plans to get justice. I was the one who understood him. Lillian never did.”
So Rob had laid the guilt of murder on another child’s shoulders. Because to Rob and Rosalind both, killing regular people wouldn’t have mattered. But killing Lynburns, especially to defeat other people, well. That was a real crime. That had to be avenged.
Jared was used to hating his mother and feeling painfully sorry for her. He crushed both feelings down.
“I bet she didn’t,” Jared said. “But Rob will either reconcile with her or hurt her. And you don’t want him to do either. So why not let me take her away?” He hoped that his mother would assume he meant “and then we will never come back,” rather than what he was actually thinking: “and then Aunt Lillian will take back Aurimere and murder Rob.”
“Just open the door, Mother,” Jared said. “That’s all you have to do.”
“You can’t open the door,” she said in a rush. “There’s an alarm spell, and a spell on the lock as well. Two different sorcerers did the spells. You can’t concentrate on opening the door, because you’ll set off the alarm. And if you concentrate on silencing the alarm, you won’t be able to open the door.”
“Won’t I?” Jared asked. “You’re forgetting I’m a delinquent.” He concentrated on the alarm spell and reached forward, stomach lurching as his mother shied away from him and stared at him with wide horrified eyes. “I would never hurt you,” Jared whispered, and slid the earring out of her ear.
He unwound the wire and slotted it into the lock, listening for the click of the lock giving, the satisfaction of the handle turning under his palm. The door fetched up against an obstruction: Jared put his shoulder to it, hard, and heard wood splinter. The door swung open; splinters the size of daggers lay scattered across the floor.
Jared slanted a look over at his mother. “Look, Mom. Just like magic.” He stepped over the splinters and stood by the gauze-draped bed. Aunt Lillian lay there unconscious. Her face was slack and defenseless, robbed of character.
Jared heard the sound of an indrawn breath and turned to see his mother at the doorway.
“She looks like me,” his mother murmured. It seemed an absurd thing to say about her identical twin, but Jared looked at Aunt Lillian, so terribly vulnerable, and saw what she meant.
He also saw Aunt Lillian’s fists, closing on the material of the bedclothes, trying to fight her way out of unconsciousness. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, walking over to the bed and pulling Aunt Lillian up into his arms. “You two look nothing alike.”
Aunt Lillian was tall, and had some muscle, and her body was limp with unconsciousness: she was rather a heavy armful. But Jared found himself tucking his chin protectively on the top of her head. It didn’t matter that the muscles in his arms burned holding her. She was a welcome weight.
“You’re very strong,” his mother murmured. “Like your father.”
“Which father would that be?” Jared asked. It was a casual enough question, meant only as an insult flung back at her in return. But his mother looked at him silently, her lips parted, and it became more than that.
“Oh well.” Jared would have shrugged if not for the burden of Aunt Lillian. “If you don’t know, I guess I never will.”
“Rob wants you,” she said again.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jared told her. “I don’t want him.” He walked toward the door carrying Aunt Lillian. His mother retreated before him, her eyes wary as the eyes of an animal that has been incessantly hurt and cannot trust again.
“You don’t need him either,” Jared said. The words burst out of his throat. “Come on, Mom. Come with us. That’s all you need to do. Just leave him: just walk away.”
His mother shook her head, and it seemed to Jared that perhaps she couldn’t leave: perhaps so much of her had grown around Rob that she would have to tear herself away and break in the process.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me where Tenri Glass is.”
His mother shook her head again, but this time it was instant and vehement. “No. Rob would be furious.”
“And he won’t be furious about Lillian?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. Her voice echoed down the corridor in a way that made chills run down Jared’s spine.
“You’re all mixed up about that girl,” his mother continued. “You always were. You were forever insisting that she was real.”
“You swore to me that she wasn’t.”
“I was telling you the truth!” His mother’s eyes glowed, the eyes of something hunted in a wood. “She isn’t real. You have to see that. The people who can’t do magic, who aren’t connected to the earth, they aren’t real. Not the way we are.”
Jared looked into her eyes and said, “She was always more real to me than you.” If he hadn’t had Kami in his head to turn to, he wondered, would he have turned to his mother? Would she have loved him, if he had?
“Where’s Ten?” he asked. “I’m coming back for him. The only thing you can do is help me not get caught when I do.”
His mother trembled.
“Or do you want me to get caught?” Jared asked.
“No,” his mother said, the word less than a breath. “I want you safe. The child is in the attic.”
“Thank you,” Jared said. He walked down the corridor with Aunt Lillian cradled in his arms. He left his mother behind.
His tread walking down the stairs was heavier, and the shadows could scarcely wrap around both of them. Jared was sure someone would hear, or see, but he kept walking and no one did. He walked into the Aurimere garden and out through the fire again: it parted easily as if it was glad to have them free. And then they were past the fire and away from Aurimere, safe in the cool dark.
Jared laid Aunt Lillian on the ground. Her hair spread out like a river, locks forming silver tributaries in the dark grass. She stirred and muttered something, sounding imperious and lost at once.
“God, Aunt Lillian, you idiot,” Jared said, stooping over her and brushing back the hair from her face. “What did you think you were doing?”
She lay there, silent and safe. Jared settled shadow over her like a blanket and turned back to the leaping flames, leaving her hidden in the friendly dark.
Aurimere was less welcoming this time, as if the house was angry he had been stupid enough to return. The reflection of the fire cast evil red glints on the glass, as if behind every window there were watching eyes narrowed in laughter. Jared touched the walls as he went by apologetically. The firelight made them look like real gold.
He went to the same door, slipped up the same stairs, but this time when he reached the second floor he kept going. The next flight of stairs was dark and familiar to him: when he touched the banister, he felt the carving in the wood that formed flowers in running water, twined in a drowning woman’s hair.
Jared had to open a few doors before he found the stairs that led to the attic: he had not gone up there often. The door that led up to the attic was painted white. It had a round doorknob.
The ordinary door actually gave Jared pause, but he did not pause for long. He walked up the fragile wooden stairs, and when his foot hit a step he called on the air to muffle the creak. He called the darkness to wrap around him.
Shadow and silence, silence and shadow, every step. Nobody would see or hear him coming.
When he reached the attic, he looked around and saw oriel windows that the moonlight was shining directly through. They looked like huge pearls, softly glowing in the dark walls.
For a moment everything seemed to be shadows and silence, and Jared thought he had been wrong. Then he heard the low murmur of Rob’s voice and knew that his mother had betrayed him after all.
He walked through the dark, toward the sound of Rob Lynburn speaking. He opened one door, begging the hinges to stay quiet, and crossed a dark room. There was light seeping in from the cracks of the closed door across the room. Electric light, slipping easy and yellow as butter under the door, and the murmur of Rob’s low pleasant voice. Jared would have liked to fight him, but there was Ten to think of. He had to wait Rob out.
“I thought you would be pleased,” his mother’s voice said.
Jared concentrated on the door, pleading for quiet, begging with the air not to carry sound, and it swung silently open, just a few crucial inches. There was furniture in the room beyond, swathed in white sheets. It looked like an entire sofa set had died and been wrapped in shrouds.
He looked around the door and saw Rob standing over his mother, so much taller than her that he appeared to be looming. Neither of them was looking at the door.
Jared took a chance. He pulled the shadows close, so close that the darkness faded and moonlight spread into the corners of the empty room where he stood, and he could hardly see. He went down low and crossed, in two swift steps, to behind the shrouded couch.
Once crouched down there, he told himself he was an idiot. His mother had told Rob where he was headed. She had not given a second thought to betraying him. He should not dream of trying to help her.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Rosalind,” Rob said. He put a hand against her throat, gently turning her face up to his. “When exactly did you see Jared?”
The lightbulbs in this room were not shaded but set in clear glass casements, and the naked electric light sheened his mother’s lashes with gold. It seemed like a gold shutter obliterated the color of her eyes for a moment as she blinked. “I—I don’t understand.”
“Before he took Lillian?” Rob inquired. “Or after he took her? She’s my wife. She’s valuable. You should have known that the thing to do was instantly raise an alarm.”
“He would have fought,” Jared’s mother said with commendable speed. “He’s unstable. I’ve told you that. I thought you wouldn’t want to risk your sorcerers, I thought it would be better to catch him by surprise.”
“You thought it would be better to lose Lillian than risk sorcerers who aren’t even Lynburns?” Rob asked. He was caressing his mother’s tumbled hair, hands and voice steady, kind. “Oh, Rosalind,” he said. “Try again.”
She retreated back into the safe territory of incomprehension. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t believe you,” Rob told her. The tone of his voice was so reassuring. “Rosalind. Fool me once … and you did, didn’t you? Now you’ve let me down again. The others, they’re mistaken, they’re being stupid, but at least when they see the light I’ll know I can trust them. How can I fight with you at my back when you might change your mind at any time, Rosalind? How can I trust you? I simply can’t.”
His voice was like a lullaby. It was hard to make out the actual words and not respond to the tone: Jared saw his mother straining in toward Rob, face open and eager to make it up to him. “You can,” she assured him. “Rob, I’m sorry. I love you. You have to believe me. I love you. I love you.”
“Shhh,” said Rob. He laid his cheek against her shining hair. “Hush now. I believe you. I do.” Jared hardly saw him move, in the shadowed space between their two bodies. He was aware of Rob’s hand going to his belt, but it seemed like a meaningless gesture until he saw Rob’s arm go back, saw the clean purposeful thrust. “I have only ever loved one woman,” Rob told her gently. “And it wasn’t you.”
His mother drew in a startled, shuddering breath.
“You’re no use to me, Rosalind,” Rob explained, still kind and reasonable. He drew out one of the Lynburn daggers, its gold blade drowned in slick blood, and stepped back, letting Jared’s mother slide to the ground.
It had all happened so fast that Jared had not quite believed it was happening. Now it was done, and he had not done a thing.
There was blood spreading across his mother’s torso, turning the pale material of her dress dark. His mother’s cheek was resting against the floorboards, and their gazes met. The light was dying in her eyes, a candle guttering under one last too-violent breath.
Her outflung hand was lying under the sofa. Jared reached out to touch it, he hardly knew why, to save her when it was too late to save her or to comfort her when he’d never been able to comfort her.
They had never been able to save each other.
He could not quite reach: their fingers did not quite meet.
She breathed once more, the sound halting and sticky. She did not breathe again. Her eyes were still open, staring at Jared, but they were dull as glass with the light gone out behind it.
Jared crouched on the floor looking into his dead mother’s eyes, until the sofa crashed into the farthest wall.
“Hello, son,” said Rob.
Jared didn’t get to his feet: he just hurled a handful of air at Rob, like a storm thrown from his palms.
Rob did not even raise a hand. He just glanced at the air and it obeyed him instead. He had Lynburn blood on one of the Lynburn daggers. His mouth shaped a faint sneer. “Really, Jared,” he said. “Be more intelligent.”
But Jared had something else. He had a strand of Rob’s hair, found in his hairbrush at Aurimere, saved for this occasion. “Noli me tangere,” said Jared, and his spell knocked Rob across the room.
It gave him enough time to run, and he ran. He ran for the attic door and blasted it open with a spell. Ten Glass sprang up, pieces of door scattering at his feet. He looked so small, wide-eyed and terrified, and Jared was so scared he would fail him.
“Ten,” he said, “get out of the house, get to my Aunt Lillian. Go fast. Go now!”
Ten stared at him for another instant and then obeyed, charging past Jared and Rob, making for the stairs.
Rob was already on his feet. He lunged for Ten, and Jared launched himself at him, feeling the strand of hair go up in smoke in his hand.
Rob sneered. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Jared said between his teeth, and lunged for Rob’s dagger.
He grabbed the blade, slicing open his palm and knowing his blood was mingling with his mother’s, still warm on the cold gold. He gripped the dagger and threw himself at Rob again, knocking him back, not caring about keeping his own balance. They hit the floor. Rob used his weight to pin Jared to the ground. Rob was bigger and stronger. He grabbed Jared’s free wrist and Jared could feel the power behind his grip, trying to wrench his arm out of its socket.
Jared bared his teeth at him in a grimace and sank the dagger into Rob’s shoulder. It was all he could reach. His stomach turned at the sound and sensation of the blade cutting through a body, through gristle and meat.
Rob had put this knife through his mother. Jared sank it in up to the hilt, and twisted.
Rob let a pained hiss leak out between his locked teeth, his big heavy body suddenly heavier on Jared’s. Then he got in Jared’s face and pressed a kiss on his cheek. “My boy,” he breathed into his ear. “Who knew Rosalind would be the one who had my real heir? Nothing stops you, does it? And you already have the taste for blood.”
“Whose boy I am seems to be up for debate,” Jared remarked breathlessly, tugging at the blade. There was so much blood on his hands, it was difficult.
“Oh, look at you,” Rob murmured. “A real Lynburn. You breathe and the house listens. If I’d had the raising of you instead of Ash, I know what you’d be. I don’t have any doubts.”
Jared did not have any wish to hear about Ash’s inherent goodness, or think about how much better he would be for Kami. He felt dizzy with rage and the desire to shut Rob up. The world was going black, splattered with scarlet.
This wasn’t rage, he realized, his thoughts surfacing from drowning darkness. Rob was sucking the air out of his lungs. He was suffocating. “What do you want?” he gasped out.
“You on my side,” Rob said. “You by my side.”
Every breath cut Jared’s throat, as if he was swallowing razors. “Oh yeah. Sign me up for evil.” He grinned wildly up at Rob, even though his sight was going dark: Rob’s face dissolving away from him, everything turning formless and strange. “Give me a weapon and put me at your back. You can totally trust me. I swear.”
He laughed, the sound almost a whine, and Rob laughed with him, full and hearty. Jared tried to get hold of the dagger, of his magic, of anything, but the world kept up its slow terrible slide away.
“You don’t understand what I’m really doing yet. You don’t understand anything yet. But you will. All you need is a little training,” Rob said soothingly. “Like a horse. You simply need to be broken.”
Jared twisted underneath Rob in one last desperate burst of strength, not fighting anymore, just trying to get away. He couldn’t. He was losing the fight; he was losing the world.
Distantly, as if it was happening to someone else, he felt the dagger slip out of his hand. He felt Rob’s hand, still horribly gentle, stroking his hair.
He heard Rob’s voice, low in his ear.
“I know just the place for you.”
Jared woke up with his legs jammed between a wall and his chest. His head was pounding, and his cheek was pressed against another cold wall. He felt himself gasping as he surfaced into consciousness, remembering suffocation even though his lungs were expanded again, air coursing through them as it should.
The air smelled stale. It smelled of something else as well.
He couldn’t focus on it. He couldn’t focus on anything, fire or earth, wood or water. He was trapped, in an enclosed space he didn’t know where, in a little pocket locked away from magic.
Jared dragged in another breath of air and tried to force himself to be calm. His legs were trapped. He couldn’t move them, so he tried to move his arms.
One of his elbows met stone. His other elbow met something else, something that felt like a coatrack: cloth and a frail structure behind it.
Jared looked to his side, and felt the breath dry up in his throat.
There was scarcely any light in the confined space. What light there was was faint but not dim enough that Jared couldn’t make out the shadowy form that sat beside him, back against the other wall, knee to knee with him, head bowed.
There was so little light that everything looked gray, but Jared knew the fragile remains of the boy’s skin really were gray. His chin rested against his chest, but Jared could see the withered side of his cheek, the shadowed hollows of his eyes, or the sockets that might once have been his eyes.
His clothes were worn and old, rotten in places but mostly preserved in that dry air. It was clothing from decades ago.
The hair hanging in that drawn gray face was dry and pale, curling the way dead leaves curled, so pale it looked bone white in this light.
It made Jared think of Holly’s blond curls. It made him think of Aunt Lillian.
Edmund Prescott, the boy Lillian would have married. Except that he had run away when he was seventeen.
He had disappeared, and left Rob to marry the heir of Aurimere.
Jared wanted to scream, but he found himself just gasping dry air and staring down at his hands. There was so much blood on them, dark in the gray light. His own, his mother’s, Rob’s: there was no way to tell, and it didn’t seem to matter.
Rob had left a boy here to die, alone in the dark, once before.
Jared closed his eyes and pressed his face against the cold wall. A terrible sound rose helplessly, low in his throat: he clenched his hands against his knees and would not look at all that remained of Edmund Prescott.
He found, after a long dark moment, that there was something he could focus on after all. There was Kami: not in his head, not in any way he could reach. But he could hold on to the images of her, all the memories he had. He could string instants of remembered light up against the enveloping dark.
His breaths were the only sound in that tiny space, walled up alive with the dead.
The swift impatient movement of her hands when she talked and wanted to be writing. The curve of her mouth, the vivid flash of her eyes, and the smile that could leap across a room at you. The steely grip of her hand, in lake water colder than death, the promise in that grasp that she would not let him go.
Another dry desperate sound broke from Jared’s throat. He leaned his forehead against his bloody hands, and waited in the dark.
It was a couple of hours before Kami noticed. The conversation kept starting and fading away, every plan petering out but none of them willing to give up. There had to be some way forward that was not a dead end.
Eventually, though, she went out to the front of the pub. Martha was closing up, wiping down the bar. People were standing by the door in a loose cluster, aware that they should go but terrified to leave.
And Jared was nowhere in sight.
“I thought Jared might be helping you,” Kami said. Dread was already rising inside her, building slowly.
Martha shook her head. “I think he’s with young Ash.”
“He’s not,” Kami told her. “Ash has been in there with us for hours.”
Martha stopped wiping the bar. She looked up, and her and Kami’s eyes met. Kami whirled around and ran up the stairs, to Jared’s old room above the pub, to every one of the bedrooms. She flung open doors, telling herself that Jared had been through a lot tonight, they all had, he might just be resting, and her own frantic heartbeat called her a liar.
When Kami went back downstairs, she found the others in the bar, talking to Martha. Everybody was there but Tomo, who must have been left sleeping in the other room. She felt Ash’s feelings before she saw him, hurt and tiredness pierced through with agony, canceling out everything else.
They all turned to her as she came in, even Dad.
Kami held on to the bar to keep her balance and began, even though she didn’t know how to finish. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
The door of the Water Rising slammed open.
Lillian Lynburn stood framed in the doorway. Her hair was wild over her shoulders, tangled up with the lights of burning fires and the coming morning. Her face was white as a dead woman’s.
Her hand was in Ten’s. Kami’s little brother stood there, trembling but safe. Kami had not realized, until she felt like her heart would break under the sheer weight of her relief, how very afraid she had been for him.
Dad crossed the floor in two steps, took Lillian Lynburn by the shoulders, and shook her.
“How dare you?” he demanded, and the townspeople scattered away from them, wearing the same expression they would have worn if Dad had tried to fight a lion in the town square. “Is this your idea of protecting the town? Is that how you want people to think of you—as a witch who steals children?”
He let her go and knelt down by Ten, clasping Ten’s face in his hands, kissing his face. A violent tremor ran all through Ten’s body.
“I’m—” Lillian swallowed, a dry sound. “I’m sorry, Jon.”
Dad stood, Ten’s hand in his now. The people around them looked amazed: he still looked fierce. “You’d better be. If you ever touch one of my children again, I’m going to kill you. And if you expect us to follow you, you’re going to have to change.”
Lillian had no response for that. She was looking past Dad, at Ash. All feeling seemed to drain out of her, standing there gaunt in the shadows. Her eyes were so pale they looked like winter ice instead of blue, the winter ice of the pools where all Lillian’s sorcerers had died.
“Mom,” Ash said, and Kami felt his resolve snap in her mind, knew that he could say no more.
She was the one who had to speak.
“Lillian,” she said, “tell me where Jared is.”
When Lillian answered, her voice sounded distant, as if she was making a proclamation. As if she was a specter or a banshee calling out tidings of death.
“He went to Aurimere alone,” Lillian said. “He got me out. He got the boy out. He saved our lives, and he paid for our lives. I woke outside the house with the child calling me to part the flame and let him through. We waited out in the dark for as long as we could, but Jared never followed us. The boy says Rob caught him, which means that he is in Rob’s grasp now. He is past all help. He is lost.”
Of course he’d done that. How could she, who knew him so well, not have known what he would do? What else would he have done but the most heroic and crazy thing possible? And he had succeeded. He had saved someone he loved and someone she loved, brought them out from under the shadow of death. He was gone beneath that shadow now, vanished into the sorcerers’ manor. Lillian was saying that she would never see him again.
Darkness rose up before Kami’s eyes, as if she was going to faint, but she refused to faint. She felt Ash’s feelings course through her as his gasp rang through the room. He stumbled toward his mother and almost collapsed headlong into her arms. Lillian stood still for a moment, then her hand rose in a stiff jerky motion and she began to awkwardly stroke his hair.
The winter wind blew through the open door, cutting through the shadows, swirling around the people clinging to each other. Everyone was linked, Kami saw, everybody holding on to somebody, and it occurred to her that even if nobody had been willing to fight Rob, nobody had offered up a victim to him either. Nobody had offered the tokens of allegiance Rob had asked for. The people of Sorry-in-the-Vale had not surrendered yet.
Kami let go her death grip on the bar and walked over to the window. She looked out at the frost-touched town and at Aurimere in the distance, swallowed by flames.
“He’s not lost,” Kami said. Her voice was steadier than she’d thought it would be. “I won’t let him be lost.”