Specks of darkness clung to them.
A small patch of it lay across Trick’s temple. A splotch of gray marked the slender curve of Devin’s neck.
“The darkness.” Rooney swallowed. “It’s touched you both. There and there.” She pointed.
Devin’s frantic hands flew to her neck. Trick scraped his fingers across his forehead.
“It’s not budging,” Devin said, but that didn’t stop her from scratching the smudge on her neck. Her nails left tracks on her skin.
“Where has it touched me?” Rooney didn’t want to know, not really. But not knowing was even worse.
She thought it might tingle, a cold, dead spot clinging to her, but she was chilled all over, no part of her shivering more than any other. She shoved up the sleeves of her coat, twisting her forearms so she could see every angle.
“Hold still.” Devin brought her braid from her right shoulder to her left, covering the side of her neck where the darkness crouched. She set a hand on Rooney’s boot, steadying her, and then looked her over, toes to head.
Rooney knew the moment Devin spotted the gray-dark upon her. A little gasp escaped from between her lips.
“Tell me.”
Leaning forward, Devin touched Rooney’s cheekbone. “Here.”
The darkness had settled on the place where her mother had once laid good-night kisses.
Rooney traced her fingers over her cheek. The surface of her skin was smooth. The darkness had well and truly become a part of her.
Trick, who had been so quiet, looked at them gravely. “It’s death,” he said. “Coming for us slowly.”
“No, no, no,” Devin cried.
Around them, the darkness shuddered like an aftershock, and in that moment Rooney knew the cinching-in feeling Devin had spoken of, for the space around them felt ominously closer, like the walls of the not-sky would envelop them.
When they struck into the silk, the darkness had not only woven itself tighter—it had most decidedly shrunk.
“Come on,” Trick said, rounding them up. “It’s not safe here.”
Neither Rooney nor Devin asked where they were going. They only climbed to their feet, frowns drooping from their faces. No one looked at one another. No one said a word. Very much untogether and apart, they wandered through the trees until they spied the frail blue light from the clearing. They followed it forward … for they had nowhere else to go.
* * *
From the throne, Sorka and the children around her watched Rooney, Trick, Devin, and the Monty return. Sorka must have seen the defeat and the fear hanging from their long faces. She must have seen the gray patches newly latched onto their skin. Yet she did not gloat or smirk as Rooney might have expected.
Sorka’s eyes brewed a storm.
“How did you escape the cage? What magic did you call?” She spiked to her feet, looming over them, tall and willowy and grave, a black ribbon in her hair replacing her crown. “Are you apprenticing? For her?” Sorka’s tone was full of accusation.
Rooney had no idea what Sorka was talking about. And more, she did not like the way Sorka stared down her nose at them. “None of that matters! Look what’s happened to us!”
“And whose fault is that? I told you to behave, but you threatened the darkness. Doubt you’ll do that again, will you?” With her near-black hair and her dress of coal, Sorka blended in with the pitch, and right then her silly title of the Darkness seemed much less silly and all the more fitting.
“We only want to return to Warybone.” Trick took a step forward, unafraid. “Don’t you?”
Sorka’s eyes shuttered. Her voice lowered, as if she did not want the children to overhear. “This realm is wholly dark and impenetrable. Like a living graveyard. And there is no digging your way out of it.”
Rooney shuddered. They’d found that out well enough, the black hole like a crypt. “Yes, and…”
Sorka rattled on. “It can’t be burnt or torn. It can’t be sliced or cut. You cannot gouge a hole into its flesh.” Sorka seemed to delight in every harsh word. How each proclamation made Rooney and Devin flinch. “And it can be very temperamental.”
“You tried to warn us,” Devin said softly.
Sorka’s jaw clacked shut. She’d probably expected more argument, and Rooney was brimming with all the things she wanted to say—to scream—but she bit her lip.
“I didn’t want any of this to happen.” If Sorka meant it as an apology, it was a lousy one, Rooney thought. Sorka might have been talking of the cage of branches, the gray creeping over their skin, or the whole of the darkness pressing in on them.
“But you didn’t stop it,” Trick said, his voice bruised all over. “And now we’re doomed.”
One of the children—the boy who’d poked at Trick’s pocket—began to cry.
With a final glare piercing Trick, Sorka reached for the crying boy. She patted the top of his messy-haired head. “Let’s play a game,” she said, and turned abruptly toward the children so anxiously looking up at her.
And so, left alone, Rooney, Trick, and Devin passed the night lost in their own thoughts, too gloomy to utter more than a few spare words to one another.
Rooney could not even be bothered to devise a plan to steal back her mirror. What was the point? What was the need? She’d never gather moonlight again if she were to die here.
19
THE WHISPERS IN THE WOODS
Rooney’s growling stomach woke her the next day (or at least what she assumed was the next day, evidenced by the torchlight). She’d imagined many tragic ends for them, but she hadn’t before considered that they might starve to death.
“Hungry?” Devin sank down beside Rooney, gripping her bunched-up skirt like she held something within it.
“Deathly hungry,” Trick said from where he lay on the ground, his jacket tucked in a lump under his head.
Devin reached into the cradle of her skirt, then held out her hand. Trick sat up, his shirt all rumpled, and accepted one of the black-rinded fruits.
“What is it?” He peeled back the rotten-looking skin, revealing purplish wedges.
Devin shrugged her slim shoulders. “They called it a grimace fruit.”
“How does it taste?” Rooney asked, no doubt the more important question, especially with a name like that.
“Not bad.” Devin peeled one and passed it to Rooney. “It’s only the appearance that makes you grimace.”
Rooney separated a fruit wedge, which was strung with pith as gray as a cobweb, and hesitantly placed it on her tongue. She bit down. It tasted sweet.
But though the fruit filled her belly, it made Rooney’s mood no better.
However, Rooney thought, the one in the foulest of moods might have been Sorka. “What’s she got to be so glum about?”
Trick and Devin swung their heads to the side.
Some of the children—in frilly skirts, overlarge jackets, and hats too broad for their heads—acted out a play in front of the onyx throne. Instead of giving the children her attention, Sorka frowned, her eyes looking past them into the woods.
“She has the best of it, but she acts like a sullen queen of the darkness.” Rooney ignored the fact that having the best of something terrible wasn’t worth much. “She takes what she wants. She does what she wants. And she’s just as miserable as the rest of us.”
“Well,” Devin said thoughtfully, and began fiddling with the hem of her skirt, as if to keep her hands busy and away from the stain of gray on her neck. “You can have something someone thinks you want, or thinks you ought to have—just as I had the lovely violin my parents gifted me—but that doesn’t mean it was what I wanted.”
“Or what you needed.” The words fell heavy from Trick’s mouth.
Rooney looked at him in disbelief—how solemnly he spoke, without an ounce of mocking in his voice.
“Well, I don’t feel sorry for her at all,” Rooney said. “Even if she’s been here longer than anyone.”
But as soon as she sa
id it, that dreaded sick feeling stirred in her belly. How long had Sorka been lost in the gloom?
* * *
That night, Rooney slept fitfully with these thoughts, all twisted up in dreams of darkness. And so, when she opened her eyes to the pitch, it was no different from when they were shut, and almost, she could not tell wakefulness from slumber.
I must be awake, she thought, for the cold is in my bones. Her teeth were near chattering.
Huddled in her coat, Rooney curled into a ball, trying to warm herself, trying to drift back to sleep. She shivered and listened to the night.
Within it, the children breathed heavily. Maybe it was only because of the cold, but something seemed to weigh on the air. It filtered thick through her lungs.
It felt decidedly not right.
Or maybe it wasn’t the air. Maybe it was the darkness itself. Those small patches of it graying her skin, and it might have wormed its way into her body too—coiling through her airways, leeching onto her organs, seeping into her blood and bones.
Thoughts running too wild, Rooney bolted upright.
The Monty squeaked at the disruption, dashing out from its place behind her legs, then scampered away.
She squinted into the darkness. All its many folds swallowed the rat right up.
Even with the pinprick speckles of blue light glowing from the woods.
No, glowing from above the woods.
Maybe she was dreaming after all, to be seeing something that couldn’t possibly be there. She blinked and blinked. The light remained constant, and though it shone so dimly, a moonlit flame ignited in her chest once again.
Rooney leaned over, clumsily shaking Devin’s shoulder and then nudging Trick with her stockinged foot. “Keep quiet,” she whispered in their ears before they could fuss at her for waking them. “Please. Just look.”
In the dim, she couldn’t quite see their reactions, of course, but when they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, she felt them shivering beside her.
“It almost looks like…” Trick paused, as if he didn’t want to say aloud what he hoped for.
What Rooney hoped for too. “It might be; it is.”
She stuffed her feet into her boots, tied hasty knots, and scrambled to stand. Trick and Devin did the same. Careful of the many fingers and toes of the fretfully sleeping children sprawled on the ground around them, they sneaked toward the light.
When they entered the woods, it wavered in and out of view, caught behind the lacework of overhead branches. But there was no mistaking it.
“Moonlight,” Rooney sighed.
A narrow beam cascaded down, so pure and frail. It fell as if from a distance even greater than the one between the sky and the earth, and a pocketful of stars glinted faintly.
Rooney could see the soft lines of Devin’s face, the wonder in her eyes. They’d all thought the stars were lost forever.
“But how?” A tear glimmered on Devin’s eyelashes.
“Maybe your parents tore the sky apart looking for you.” Somehow, it was both the kindest and the cruelest thing Trick could have said.
If only it were true.
“No one’s found us just yet.” Rooney did not mean to be harsh, but it wouldn’t do any good to get their hopes up.
“But they might,” Devin said, and she dashed ahead, the length of her braid swishing against her back.
“To the light,” Rooney said, and she saw the smallest of grins edge across Trick’s face.
Rooney and Trick chased after Devin, weaving between the trees and hopping over the toys and trinkets littering the path. They drew closer and closer to the sliver of sky where the darkness thinned.
And where the air thickened.
Only once their hearts settled and their breaths quieted did Rooney hear the whispers in the woods. At first, she thought it must be two or three of the children come to see the stars as they had. But Trick brought one finger to his lips, as if he didn’t trust the voices.
Be cautious, he seemed to say.
They stole between the trees, circling closer to the true sky and the murmurs. And then they stopped all at once, Devin’s arm swinging out to keep them from going any farther.
Rooney shivered again. No wonder it was so very cold.
Drenched in soft moonlight stood Sorka … and the magician.
20
QUITE LOST
Rooney stared and stared. At Sorka. At the magician. At the moonbeam tumbling through the darkness and wrapped around the magician’s wrist three times.
She’d never seen light fall in quite this manner, stretched so thin and from such a distance. A few stars, which must have been the very brightest in the sky, blinked above.
And looking up at them, Rooney and Trick and Devin all must have been thinking the same thing—maybe they would learn of a way out of this place. Tucked behind the trees, they tilted their ears toward the secrets.
“Sorka, my devil. Sorka, my dear.” The magician’s voice came hushed as she traced her fingers along the gray-glass mirror propped against a tree. “When you did not come to the mirror, I feared what had become of you.”
“Doubtful.” Sorka narrowed her eyes.
“Truthful,” the magician replied, her billowing cloak betraying her calm. “Have you lost count of the hour?”
“Yes, and no, and maybe,” Sorka said, standing there as if she were the magician’s shadow, not a girl. “There is no telling night from day. It is all the same to me.”
“All the hours are rushing right by in Warybone, but not here. Not here. Where the darkness holds time near still. Where the quiet keeps you safe.”
“Where I can do what I want.” Sorka tossed her hair, and a tight little frown cracked across her gray-marked face. “Except there is no longer anything here I want to do.”
“Doubtful.”
“Truthful.” Sorka tilted her head, a low-boiling anger flushing her pale cheeks.
The magician’s jaw sharpened. “Yet here you must stay. Where I can always find you.”
Sorka cupped her hands around her mouth like she meant to whisper a secret. Rooney leaned forward, not wanting to miss a single word.
“Oh no, I am quite lost, you see. There is no finding me.”
“She’s talking nonsense,” Trick whispered.
But it made sense to Rooney, who felt so lost as well. Stuck in a place no one knew existed. Devin had all but said the same thing when they first arrived.
Again, Rooney considered how long Sorka might have spent in this lightless place. Rooney counted off the past few nights in her head, wondering when she too would lose track of the days entirely. When they would blend and bleed together.
Among the swaying trees, the magician stood stone still, her bones unflinching. “You are where you belong, Sorka.”
Sorka winced, as if her name resounded too loudly. “So you’ve said. So I once thought.” Her hand drifted forward, toward the moonlight streaming down like the thinnest piece of lace. “If that’s true, won’t you stay?”
The magician drew back, the moonbeam shifting with her. “Of all the foolish things to suggest. Even now, it is all I can do to keep the balance here.” The air shivered. “I cannot hold back the darkness from within it. And above, the doorway is vulnerable.”
“But I want—”
“All this time here, and you haven’t learned a thing about it.” The magician’s voice broke.
One by one, the stars above winked out. The moonlight thinned like a spent breath. As for the magician, her cheekbones sharpened in the darkening night. Cold rolled off her taut body in waves. It inched toward Rooney’s toes. She backed up, elbow to elbow with Devin, and Trick across from them, shoulders hunched against the chill.
“I’ve learned plenty,” Sorka said, swirling her fingers through the air.
The ground trembled under their feet, and Devin snatched Rooney’s hand. Rooney tensed, but none of them went rolling.
The magician cocked her head. “Is it all a game to
you, Sorka? You don’t know the firstly thing about magic. Neither its grace and breadth—”
“You’ve given me no guidance!”
The magician clutched the tenuous moonbeam. “Nor its limits, which I’ve reached.” A look of regret crossed her face. “Too soon.”
The ground shook more forcefully, sending tremors up Rooney’s legs.
“I must go.” With one last searching look at Sorka, the magician lifted her moonlight-curled arm and called to her magic, letting the moonbeam carry her skyward. Up she went, out of reach past the branches, past the treetops. Plunging through the darkness in reverse.
Sorka never once glanced up. She darted into the trees, running farther from the clearing, farther from Rooney and Devin and Trick, who stared after the magician until she had floated out of sight.
“Don’t leave us here,” Devin said, barely loud enough to be heard.
The thinnest thread of moonlight still wafted down, slanting between the trees where Sorka and the magician had just stood. Devin released Rooney’s hand, drawn toward the lovely light. It glimmered; it teased, and Devin reached for the end of the moonbeam, as if she might wrap it three times around her wrist and follow the magician back to Warybone.
Back to her parents, who she must have missed so much.
“Help me.” She cast dark eyes at Rooney and Trick. “It’s our only chance.”
Trick ran forward, and then he bent one knee. Devin set her boot on his thigh, boosting herself higher. She stretched and stretched, trying to gather the fleeting moonbeam in her hands.
But Rooney hesitated. “We can’t go now. We can’t leave just yet.”
“Of course we can. We have to.” Trick held Devin’s ankles to keep her steady, but he looked right at Rooney when he spoke, his brows drawn together. “We’ve found our doorway.”
Rooney bowed her head, but she wanted to scream again—about that child in the night she heard crying, and all the ones who never cried but hurt no less. Trick would scoff at her. He didn’t care about them. He didn’t care about anyone but himself and maybe those awful roughhouse boys.
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