by Sara Holland
“The Thief’s Fort burned down, but you were able to preserve it as it was that day,” Liam goes on, excitement quickening his words and making his eyes shine. “Only people faithful to the Alchemist, who have something of hers, can access it. I had your journal. It’s always spring in here—rain, snow never come in. And if you look from the outside, it’s just a ruin.”
“Trapped in time,” I say, marveling that I could have ever done such a thing. Liam nods. I finally tear my gaze from him and look around me. Everything is clean and—not new—but not ancient either, as if I’ve just stepped out for an errand and am now coming home. Home.
Color dances high in Liam’s cheeks. “I used to sit downstairs, sometimes, and read. I . . . I hope that’s all right.”
It takes a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in, and then a laugh bursts out of me. It startles me at first—it’s been so long since I’ve laughed, so long since I’ve been truly happy about anything. Liam’s eyes go wide.
“It’s all right,” I say hurriedly. “Of course it’s all right.”
Liam’s smile has fallen slightly, and I’m forcefully reminded of his expression at nine years old, at Everless, looking from one face to another to gauge the servant children’s reaction to an old fact he’d rattled off. I’d always thought him pompous for this—dangling his knowledge over us like a bag of blood-irons, waiting to see how impressed we all were—but considering the memory again, I see the wistfulness in young Liam’s eyes, the desire for connection burning there alongside insecurity.
“It’s wonderful,” I continue quickly. “I love it here. It feels . . . safe.”
His smile widens, making something jump in my chest. “Even though I hate to admit that Elias is right, I think it is safe, Jules,” he says. “Caro doesn’t seem to know there’s anything left.”
I manage to choke out a laugh. “How reassuring.” I realize Liam is still holding my hand. He brushes his thumb against my palm, so lightly that I’m not sure if I’m imagining the warmth brush across my skin.
My throat tightens. Inside the safety of these walls, I feel plucked out of time—far from Caro’s reach, invisible to everyone in Sempera but Liam, standing in front of me. Suddenly and all at once, I want to pull him in.
Nothing happens though, and a twinge of silly disappointment shoots through me. I tug my hand from his. “Is there something here that can help us take down Caro?”
I make myself meet his eyes when he smiles at me again.
“Perhaps. Do you want to see what we came for?”
11
In the lower room, I sit at the wooden table while Liam paces in front of me. His eyes are glittering in the way they only seem to, I’ve learned, when he’s discussing some sort of history. Behind him hangs a simple tapestry: a plain, threadbare map of Sempera rendered in blue and gold. He turns to me, hands spread in front of him, looking for all the world like he’s at the front of a classroom about to begin a lecture. For a moment, I’m seven years old again, watching a much younger Liam jog after Roan on Everless’s lawn, reciting some arcane fact that gets carried away by the wind. “Elias and I have collected accounts of the Alchemist and Sorceress over the past few years.”
Liam wears a grin on his face. It’s strange, this much joy in his eyes, untethered to the glumness he usually wears around his shoulders like a coat. I can’t help but let a smile tug at the corners of my mouth too. “I thought you were hesitant to come here.”
“Well . . . defeating the Sorceress is a puzzle, isn’t it? Puzzles can be solved.” Clearing his throat, he takes up a pile of paper from a bookshelf and crouches down in front of me, nudging plates aside before carefully laying each page down. Some are ancient like the journal; some are newer, judging by the crispness of the parchment. One with a crude illustration of a girl’s face—neither mine nor Caro’s—is scrawled on the back of what appears to be a Gerling tax log.
I scan the scatter of pages but discern only drawings and fragments of fox and snake stories. Nervousness swirls in me, dispelling the joy I felt watching Liam work. “What am I supposed to be seeing here?”
Liam points, his index finger floating from page to page. “I studied these from back to front—first just for the mystery of the Alchemist”—he reddens, but keeps going—“but then I detected a pattern. Here, here, and here, the alchemical symbols for poison and death have been found in writings you left behind, or other written accounts of knowledge I believe to be passed down by the Alchemist,” he says, more animatedly than seems fitting for talk of poison and death. “From what we could gather, all of them are from different lives—at least seven of them. We assumed it was information you were trying to pass on.”
“Or remember,” I say automatically, something stirring in me.
Liam furrows his brows but continues. “The symbols—they keep appearing in stories that tell of Fox’s death.”
An odd feeling—envy?—tugs at me, along with a surge of confidence. “I don’t remember making up stories of Fox’s death—but that can only mean I’m right. I’ve been thinking of Fox’s death. The Sorceress’s death.”
Liam sits back on his knees. “This story tells of a hound’s claw that pierces Fox’s hide. This one of a tooth that takes away her life in a single bite. Which isn’t so interesting until you know that, in high Semperan, the same word was used for tooth and claw, which means they might have been referring to the same item. They’re simply translated differently by the scholars who worked on them.”
He looks expectantly at me, but I don’t say anything, dizzied by the onslaught of information. There’s bitterness too, gathering so swiftly in my chest that I’m afraid to speak. All this time, while Papa and I lived day to day, meal to meal, Liam sat here, investigating the mystery of me, the mystery of the Sorceress who was hunting Sempera for me, enshrouded in esoteric symbols and layers of secrecy. He knows more about the Alchemist than I do, I think bitterly.
“There’s more,” he says hesitantly.
“Great,” I mumble.
Liam is already moving to the wall, where he carefully pulls back the tapestry. Underneath it, the wall is smooth stone—smooth, that is, except for something carved into it. An ancient glyph, strange and yet familiar somehow, the rough shape of a circle with details and flourishes flying out. Recognition stabs through me. I rise and move nearer to it.
At a closer distance, I can see that the glyph is not one shape but several, interwoven into one impossible maze of twists and curls and sharp corners. Simple circles and squares morph into fractured lines that burst into symbols that are—or might be, for all I know—ancient Semperan. All the forms are stacked on top of one another as intricately as needles and straw are wound into a bird’s nest, coming together to make the solid form I saw at a distance. With my nose almost pressed against it, I see that the delicate lines are actually chiseled out of the stone. The tool must have been impossibly small and sharp. Inside each furrow is a fine gold powder, which makes the glyph shine softly in the light streaming in through the window.
Uncontrollably, I shiver.
“This is familiar,” I say, and glance over my shoulder to see Liam’s eyes widen. “Not this one exactly, but something similar was carved above the door of Calla’s hedge shop. Crofton’s hedge witch. Not this complicated or this . . . beautiful.”
The glyph is beautiful, almost otherworldly, intricate and complicated like nothing else I’ve seen. I close my eyes, trying to remember Calla’s shop in detail from the time before Papa forbade me from visiting her. I had always believed that Papa was only being strict, trying to ensure that I wouldn’t grow up to be superstitious and waste my blood-irons on a hedge witch’s trappings, but now I realize he stopped me from learning about the secrets that lay within me. I loved listening to the hedge witch’s stories, not knowing what truth they could contain.
“Calla told me that it was meant to ward away . . .” The Alchemist’s spirit, I remember, trailing off. “But I went back one day and
it was taken down.”
“My mother ordered routine sweeps of all the towns on our lands, to remove any of the old alchemical symbols. Usually whenever she was trying to curry favor with the Queen.” Liam gestures toward the blown-away wall behind us, where the Thief’s Fort, broken, appears to lie open to the night.
“So these—” I fix my eyes back on the glyph, trying to decipher a single shape above the many. My mind whirs. “What do these symbols mean? They wouldn’t be carved into a wall if they weren’t important, would they?”
I raise my hand to touch the wall, then stop, stilled by fear. After a moment Liam joins me at the wall and traces over the lines with the assurance of long familiarity.
“It’s an ancient language of sorts used by old scholars and alchemists. Many of these symbols are even older than ancient Semperan, and no one knows where they originated.” He points to one simple curved line. “This one denotes water.” He pauses, tracing his finger over a circle with a smaller circle inside it. “This looks like a canine head. But this one is time itself. Alchemists—you and your followers—passed down their history however they could, even though the Queen—or Caro, maybe—destroyed it at every turn. They passed it down in pieces, in stories. They had to protect their knowledge from the Sorceress. So nothing was ever simple with them.”
“Of course not.” But my old stories are already surfacing in my mind. When Snake had stolen Fox’s heart, he swallowed it whole.
“It took us years to figure out what they all meant, even longer to distinguish all of them. But this one, which is repeated several times, means weapon, same as in the papers. And this one, the biggest of all, means love or heart. But this one—” He steps away from the wall. “This one denotes evil. Placed like this, they form something like a sentence: a weapon against a great evil.”
“A weapon against a great evil? Against Caro,” I breathe. A thrill drops cold down my spine. Suddenly all my memories seem to dance tantalizingly close to the surface, as if all I need to do is step forward and I will fall in. Something seems to move over my shoulder, in the corner of my eye—but when I snap my head around to look, nothing is there.
Vaguely, I hear Liam’s voice over my shoulder. “There are other symbols that I still don’t know the meaning of. It’s taken me years to search discreetly, but I can’t find any record of them, nor can Elias. . . .”
But his words sound distant, like he’s at the other end of a long tunnel. I shudder.
My sight blurs. All except for the glyph on the wall before me, which seems to become sharper somehow, more visible. My breath and heartbeat speed up and I reach behind me for Liam, suddenly desperate for something, someone to anchor me to the moment. But before I can touch him, he dissolves in my sight and his voice fades, replaced by a tangle of others. Voices everywhere, familiar somehow, but panicked.
My vision clears. I breathe in the smell of something sharp and sweet. Liam isn’t there. The Thief’s Fort is whole but lacks the shimmer it had a moment ago, the light outside the windows matching the light inside. It seems realer somehow. And there are people all around me. Men and women in jewel-toned robes.
And they are in chaos.
They run, shouting, pulling books and scrolls from the shelves and shoving them beneath their cloaks, clustering around the window to stare out into the night. By the door, a dark-skinned old man hands out swords to people as they pass, and near me, a wan but bright-eyed young woman is standing by a table, her hands trembling as she wraps glass jars in cloth and tucks them into a burlap sack. As I stare, a tear slips down her cheek.
What’s happening? I try to ask, but the words come out warped and muffled, like I’m speaking underwater. Still, the woman whips around toward me, extends a hand to help me to my feet.
“We have to leave, my lady,” she says, voice rough with fear and unshed tears. “She’s here. The Sorceress.”
Downstairs, there’s a mighty crash; someone screams. And through the open door, winding up the stairs, I smell smoke.
Remember, I think frantically, panic stabbing through me before I can even register what needs to be remembered—panic because I know that the Sorceress is here, for me, and that I am not going to leave Bellwood’s gates alive. I watch as my own hands reach out to the wall of stone, feel the pain as I trace the symbols over and over with my fingers, until my skin is broken and bleeding, and my blood dissolving the stone underneath into the shape of a message. Water. Lead. Ruby. Evil. Weapon. Claw.
My bloodied finger goes to trace one more, in the shape of a crescent moon—and stops.
I whirl around to face the Sorceress. Her dark streaming hair is tangled with blood and ash, though a blue silk ribbon snakes through it. My eyes fall to where her dress is torn, revealing a line of scarred skin—pink and jagged and screaming—directly over her heart. The mark shimmers in the growing heat.
“You thought you could run?” Caro snarls and lunges toward me, stripping the blue ribbon from her hair and wrapping it around my neck in one fluid movement.
And then—
Black, empty. I’m somewhere else, though the space around me is so dark, it seems like nowhere at all.
Pain explodes across my body. Heat pulses in my palm, sharp and persistent. I look down and uncurl my fingers. My aching fist. Both raw and pulsing.
I’m holding a bloodred jewel the length of a year-coin, sharp at one end as if I’d pulled it out of a great beast. The body of the gem is wound with a stone snake that uncurls into a handle. A dagger. Claw. Tooth. Weapon. Horror and awe in equal parts rush over me. The jewel spills crimson light over my fingers, like it’s really bleeding in my hand. Staring deep into the light dancing on the blade, I see a reflection smiling back at me—
No. Caro smiles back at me. The Sorceress’s face, refracted a dozen times in the dagger’s glassy surface.
And—Caro is there, really there. On the ground below me, head tipped back, eyes wide.
I did this.
And now I must hide it, keep it safe. Remember. I must run . . .
An unseen hand grabs my arm, and I scream.
“Jules!” someone barks. A boy’s voice, familiar. The scream and roaring die in my head, the darkness dissolves into a pale light and the room swims into focus—
But quiet now, empty except for Liam and me.
Liam is staring down at me, wide-eyed and pale, but not at my face. I follow his gaze down to my own hands and a wave of shock goes through me, just before the pain hits. My fingers are bloodied, the nails torn. My fists are clenched white with streaks of red, just as they were in my vision. Slowly, heart pounding, I unfurl my hand—
To reveal nothing. Nothing but air.
12
Disappointment floods my chest, so sudden and strong it’s an effort to hold in a sob. I’m on my knees beside the table, shivering, hating how easily the vision stole away the comfort and warmth of the Thief’s Fort. My stomach roils. Liam crouches down next to me, brushes a hand over my arm. I need to push him away—but I can’t. I don’t.
“What happened? What did you see?” he asks gently.
But the words flow around me like wind, not sinking in. I feel as heavy and confused as when I wake from a daytime sleep to see that the light has faded into dusk. The panicked faces of the people in my dream—lesser alchemists, I realize, my followers—flash in my mind. The Sorceress came here, to the Thief’s Fort, to hunt me. Wrapped her ribbon around my neck in an effort to choke me. Did she succeed? How many of the alchemists escaped? How many succumbed to the Sorceress’s smoke?
I breathe heavy, ragged. Liam puts an arm around me and pulls me against him, unclasping his cloak and arranging it so that it drapes over me, a blanket. Warming me, hiding me. I didn’t realize until just now that I’m freezing, shivering hard. Liam’s heart beats beside me once again; this time I feel the tension in his muscles, the low tumble of words that are meant to give comfort. I should pull away, I know, but I feel like I might fall apart if I do. The Thief’s Fort�
��my home—danced a promise of revelation in front of me, only to snatch it away.
“It’s all right,” Liam murmurs into my hair. He pulls me in closer, even though I’ve stopped trembling by now, and wraps his other arm around me, as if he could shield me from harm. I can still feel the tension in him—but there’s warmth in him too, offsetting the cold knot of fear in my chest.
My mind is reeling with images, one overtaking another and another and another, flitting behind my closed eyelids as rapidly as the colorful flipbooks Roan Gerling had when we were children. I try to put them in order, make sense of what I just saw. Beside me, Liam stays quiet. Neither of us move until silence has reigned for several minutes. When I speak, it’s to say, “I saw something. A weapon of some kind.”
His eyes widen. “A weapon?”
“Yes.” I look down at my hand, still half expecting the jeweled dagger to be there. With a jolt, I remember Caro at my feet, mouth twisted open in a scream. The same image I saw after I stabbed her in Shorehaven’s gardens. “I don’t know what the dagger was or where it came from, but I felt it. It was as real as holding on to—”
I stop abruptly, realizing that I’ve taken Liam’s hand in mine to prove my point. I hurriedly unlace my fingers from his. Untucking slightly from the shell of his cloak, I gesture to the papers still scattered before us, then to the shining glyph on the wall. “What if it’s the weapon you noted in your papers? The symbol on the wall—” I turn to stare at the gold glyph carved into the stone. “Why else would I have such a clear vision of it?”
Liam pauses a few seconds before nodding, clears his throat. “It’s possible, I suppose. Maybe something you created in a past life. Is it here?”
I breathe out sharply. Excitement at what I saw and frustration at Liam for being hesitant meet in my chest like hot and cold air. A storm brewing. “I . . . I don’t know.”
Liam’s face falls. “Did you see where it was?”
