I slumped to my knees on the thick carpet, and pressed my head to the ground. Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes, the first signs that the flood of grief would soon break. A heavy hand fell on my back, and then another, and another as my boys surrounded me.
“This is the only thing you’ve done to help Daigh?” I heard Clara ask through my shield of guys. “There’s been nothing else?”
I lifted my head. Isadora tossed her hair over her shoulder and glared at me. “Only a few weeks before the ritual that bound his powers, he – and by him I mean that man over there—” she pointed at Smithers, “came to me with the gift of a painting. In exchange for the canvas, he wanted information about binding. The Soho coven curates one of the finest witchcraft libraries in the world, containing many rare volumes, not the provincial cabinet you cobbled together at your castle, you understand?”
Anger at her insult to Corbin’s greatest joy rushed through me. Beside me, Rowan stiffened. “Don’t make me understand your face into a new shape,” Arthur growled.
“If you want information from me, you’ll obtain it only when you stop acting like barbarians.”
“Isadora,” Clara warned.
The witch sighed. “Daigh asked that I not tell Aline he was possessing that fool of a painter or that he came to me for advice about binding.”
“Rob was no fool,” Smithers chirped up. “Rob knew the birds from the trees from the flowers from the bees.”
“Do keep the monkey quiet,” Isadora frowned.
I snorted. “You call Smithers a monkey when you were the one dancing for Daigh’s amusement? Daigh got himself one sweet deal when he found you – a weak witch willing to do his bidding for the chance to lick his boots.”
“Oh no, I received more than sufficient payment for my services,” Isadora smiled, baring a row of white teeth, “although the painting was wretched. It had no touch of Daigh’s magic. When I took it into Sotheby’s, they laughed me out the door. I finally managed to sell it online, but for a twentieth of the price Daigh promised me it was worth.”
My head snapped up. I remembered something Hendricks, the guide at the National Gallery, had said about a final Robert Smithers portrait that hit the market just before he was institutionalized, and how it seemed as though the painter had lost his talent overnight. It was too much of a coincidence. Isadora had seen that last painting. Maybe it would tell us something that could help us understand how this binding had affected me and my magic.
Flynn sensed it, too. His grip on my arm tightened. “Did you keep a copy of it?”
“Of course not. It was ghastly.”
“Can you remember the details? Was there anything in it that could link it to the fae or—”
Isadora wrinkled her nose. “One cursory inspection was all I needed to ascertain the artist had lost his talent forever. I never so much as glanced at it again. I cannot even remember the subject of the portrait.”
I slumped back on the rug. “It’s buried in a private collection somewhere. We’ll never see it, and it could have been an important piece of Daigh’s plan.”
“Don’t be so sure.” Ryan gestured for Simon to lean down. He whispered something in the butler’s ear. Simon left the room. When Ryan didn’t volunteer any further information, I sat back on my knees and glared at Isadora.
“In London, you said to me that you knew a way to stop Daigh.”
“I did say that, didn’t I?”
“Tell me,” I growled.
“You already have the answers, thanks to Clara’s sticky fingers. You need nothing from me.”
“Tell me!”
“I won’t,” she shot back. “There is little point in dragging up what is past and what is done. Daigh has no power. You have magic enough to defeat the Slaugh. If you want to torture and kill the fae king for his crimes, I won’t stop you. As far as I’m concerned, this matter has entirely resolved itself.”
“But the fae—”
“The fae will continue to be a thorn in our side, as they have been for centuries. After the Slaugh they will be forced back into their realm and they won’t be able to emerge again for some time. It will be as it always was.”
“Don’t you get it? We can’t go back to how it always was. The fae have tasted victory. They killed twenty-two people and turned a whole village against us. They have Liah to lead them, and she has none of Daigh’s earthly attachments to witches. Briarwood’s magic has been broken. Even if we defeat the Slaugh, we’re unprotected. We can’t—”
Simon entered the room, carrying a square canvas in his arms. He leaned the painting against Ryan’s legs. Ryan turned over the image and held it up, his face beaming in triumph. “Was this what you wanted to see?”
I scrambled to my feet and squinted at the painting, trying to sort out what I was looking at. It was a portrait all right, but it took me a few moments to figure out of who.
It was Daigh, but not as I’d ever seen him. The fae king’s angular features had been rendered in long, lurid strokes. Instead of the cruel indifference that shone in his emerald eyes, here the irises were tinted with fear. His mouth hung open – a crooked, gaping maw from which issued a curling tendril of smoky darkness – like a snake who’d been chewing on too much licorice. His face seemed to sink, dripping toward the edge of the page. The slick varnish on top of the canvas only added to the illusion that the whole portrait melted under a cruel flame.
I turned the image this way and that, but I couldn’t make sense of it. “Flynn?” I angled the painting toward him. “You’re the artist here. Is that…”
“…a piece of shite? Why yes, Maeve. It is.”
Ryan laughed. “Excellent spotting, Flynn. That was exactly what caught my eye about it. This painting is bad—”
“Hey!” Smithers cried.
“—but it’s deliberately bad. Look at those brushstrokes – that’s that fine work of a classically-trained artist. See the structure of the face – it’s as perfect as any of the old masters. But then why has the artist deliberately distorted it and made it look so grotesque?”
“Because Daigh didn’t paint it,” I said, realization hitting me. “Robert Smithers did.”
All eyes in the room flicked to Smithers. He rolled his eyes at the ceiling and flashed a vacant smile.
“Honey, did you paint that picture?” Aline asked, patting his arm. “Did you do it yourself, without any help from Daigh… I mean, from Robert?”
Smithers clicked his tongue. “Robert wanted a portrait. He said I needed something to remember him when he left. I wanted to carry a piece of him with me always. He hated it but it was too late. Ha ha!”
Smithers’ barking laugh echoed around the vast room. I stared at the painting again, and for the first time I noticed something at the edges. A shadow that seemed to flicker across the paint. “Clara, can you come here?”
She heaved her body off the couch and stood beside me.
“Could you sense if there was magic inside this painting?” I asked. “Like there was in Aline’s portrait?”
Rowan had felt Smithers’ earth magic last time, but right now he was so messed up I didn’t expect him to have any kind of control. And I couldn’t ask Smithers, because I’d never get a straight answer. Even though Clara was a spirit witch, I felt certain she knew how to sense something inside the painting. Sure enough, she pressed her hands against the paint. Her eyelids fluttered closed as she searched the pigments. A moment later, her eyes flew open, and she tore her hands away.
“Yes,” she whispered. “And it’s fae magic.”
My heart pattered in my chest. A new idea was forming in my mind, a sense of exactly what Robert Smithers might’ve been trying to do. I took a deep breath and turned to Isadora. “When Smithers came to you with this painting, what did he want to know about bindings? Tell me exactly.”
“I don’t have a photographic memory for conversations that happened two decades ago,” Isadora snapped.
“Well, you better start rem
embering,” Arthur growled, waving his sword in front of her face.
“I said, I don’t know! Something about the lore witches had around bindings, if the children were viable, and what magic they would possess. He wanted to know who kept the children of bindings in myth – the fae or the witches, and if there was some magical connection between the child and the parents – if a child could sense who their true parents were through magic, or some such ridiculous thing.”
“That’s what I thought.” I slid back onto the sofa, my mind reeling. It wasn’t Daigh asking, it was Smithers. He knew Daigh was leaving him, and his addled mind had cobbled together a plan, and not just a plan to save Aline, to save the world, but to save me.
He wanted to be my dad.
“You look like Obelix after Arthur gives him a sneaky bowl of cream,” Blake said, patting my knee. “Spill the secret, Princess.”
“I think…” I turned over the ideas in my head. “I’m not certain on a lot of points, but I think we owe Smithers here a lot more credit. Daigh lived in his head for all those months, and I think Smithers heard and understood more about his plans than even Daigh realized. Smithers knew that there had been a binding, and that Daigh wanted to take Aline and Maeve back to the fae world with him. We assumed he’d placed Aline in the painting because he thought she was in love with Daigh, but I think what he really did was create Aline’s portrait in order to save her from what Daigh planned. And he used this painting to trap some of Daigh’s power so that he wouldn’t be able to return for me or Aline. Does that sound right, Rob?”
“Robert thought he was tricksy, but I was tricksy, too,” Smithers sang, beating his fist against his knee. “Tricksy, tricksy, tricksy!”
Ryan leaned the painting against the mantle, standing back to admire it. “I knew it was special as soon as I saw it. I think it might be your finest work, Rob.”
Smithers beamed. Aline placed her arm around his shoulders, burying her face in his neck so she could whisper something in his ear. A pang of something shot down my side. Pride, tinged with sadness.
Daigh’s desire for Aline had robbed her of years of happiness, of the life she could have had with a non-crazy Smithers, of raising me and being my mother. Even though Daigh was still taking and taking and tearing our lives apart, at least we’d given her back this tiny piece of the future she should have had. Maybe she could have it again.
I turned away from them, my eyes darting back to Smithers’ painting. This time, the ugliness of Daigh’s features struck me as hilarious. How he must’ve started when he saw it! I snorted at the image of Smithers painting away merrily while Daigh screamed protests inside his head. It really was genius.
“So we’ve got a painting that contains some of Daigh’s power,” Flynn whistled. “Isn’t that a bargaining chip? We dangle the promise of a smidgeon of power over his head to get him to tell us what he’s chancin’ with this scheme of his.”
“We already know what he wants – Maeve and Aline, and the rule of the fae and human worlds.” Arthur glared at the portrait. His hand stroked the hilt of his sword. “Now he’s got none of those things, and he’s locked up. All we need to do is finish the job.”
“Agreed,” I said.
Kelly raised a tentative hand. Beside her, Jane reached over and rubbed her knee. The gesture was so tender it drove a stake through my heart. It was the kind of movement Corbin would’ve made. “Um… I know I’m just a human and I don’t have any magical powers—”
“That’s correct, you do not.” Isadora wrinkled her nose.
“—but why are you all so eager to kill this guy? I know he’s kind of the evil super villain, but right now he’s defenseless. Isn’t that like, against your witch code or whatever?”
“No,” I said, at the same time Rowan whispered, “yes.”
“Daigh killed our parents, Kelly. He killed Corbin, and he was going to kill you. Even as a human with no powers, he’s dangerous. He’s been stripped of his power before and he managed to come back.”
“I get it. He’s a bad dude.” Tears spilled down Kelly’s cheeks. “But if he turns my sister into a murderer, then as far as I can see, he wins.”
“This isn’t about me,” I snapped. “It’s about the whole world. We have to put an end to this, and that means putting an end to him. If we don’t stop Daigh he’ll just come back again, like he did before. Next time we might not be able to stop him.”
“We could turn him over to the fae,” Blake piped up. “Let them kill him. Problem solved.”
“That’s not any better!”
“Yeah, and I want to do it myself,” Arthur growled, lifting his blade an inch out of its scabbard.
“Murder is never okay,” Kelly sobbed. “Who are you people? Maeve, think about Mom and Dad. I know they wouldn’t care that you’re a witch. They’d still love you. But they wouldn’t want you to be a murderer. It’s one of the ten commandments and your immortal soul—”
“Maybe I have to think about more than just myself and my immortal soul, which I don’t technically believe exists, anyway. Maybe I have to make the hard decisions to protect you, because that’s my duty. Maybe I have to do a horrific thing for the greater good of humanity.”
“Don’t you think that’s exactly what he wants?” Kelly cried. “If he really is this crazy fae who’d sell out his own powers just so he could talk to you, don’t you think he’d allow himself to be killed if it broke up this coven?”
“That’s ridiculous. Then he wouldn’t be alive to gloat over his victory,” Blake drawled.
“But he would! I mean, you know now there’s some kind of life after death, because that’s where he came from, isn’t it? He came from Hell? So he can gloat all he wants.”
“It’s not Hell, it’s another dimension,” I snapped. “And you don’t know Daigh—”
“Of course I don’t know Daigh!” Kelly yelled. “You lot didn’t trust Jane or I enough to tell us anything, and I ended up being captured by a fairy and Jane had to hear the whole story from your previously-dead mother.”
“Don’t yell at Maeve,” Arthur snarled, his voice dripping with malice.
Fresh tears flooded down Kelly’s cheeks. “And don’t threaten me, Arthur. Why are you so full of hate? When I met you I thought you were the nicest guy I’d ever known, but now you’re just a brute.”
“My best friend is dead!” Arthur yelled. The edge of the rug burst into flame. Kelly screamed and scrambled out of the way. Flynn dived for the flames, dousing them with water that pooled across the ground. The scent of sodden fibers and charred fabric filled my nostrils, driving the burning rage to the surface of my skin.
“Could you stop trying to burn down my house!” Ryan roared. Red fur bristled from his cheeks.
“All of you, shut up!” Jane screamed.
My mouth snapped shut. Kelly sniffed, folding her arms across her chest. Rowan buried his face into the back of the sofa. Arthur dropped his sword back into his scabbard and stared gape-mouthed at Jane.
“Much better,” Jane glared at us with a look I knew would terrify Connor once he grew up enough to finger paint on the walls. “I’ve got a baby asleep in the next room, so can we keep things civilized? Or else I’m going to force the person who wakes Connor to put him down again, which would serve you right. As fascinating as it is being a fly-on-the-wall for all this witch stuff, you’re all acting like a bunch of children. Since I’m a representative for the ordinary, non-magical human race – one of only two in this room, I might point out – I suggest you all take a breath, stop throwing around insults and fireballs, put away that bloody sword, and focus on the immediate problem. Which is what happened last night. There’s a dead boy who needs to be honored and buried, a police investigation going on, and a village full of people who’ve had their minds warped.”
I sucked in a breath, trying to calm the rage that bristled in my veins. Rage was good – it was better than numbness. But Jane and Kelly were right. I wasn’t thinking straight. None o
f us were. I was so focused on having Daigh at our mercy that I’d forgotten all about the village and Briarwood and what the humans were thinking right now. I needed to suck it up, to be a High Priestess, even though that was the last thing I wanted to be.
“At least the village doesn’t hate us anymore,” Blake said. “Maeve and I saw to that.”
“Are we sure?” Jane asked. “A night in jail or in the hospital getting fae wounds stitched up might be enough to undo the force of your little trick. And what are they going to do now that they’ve seen the existence of the fae for themselves? What are the police going to do? How are you going to keep your secrets? These are all practical issues you need to deal with before you get all stab-friendly with the fae king. And honestly, you guys are messed up right now. You lost someone special. Take a step back before you do something you regret. This room is filled with people who respect and support and love you – let them deal with some of this shit.”
“Jane—” My shoulders slumped. She’s right. Of course she was right. Arthur’s hand fell off his sword hilt. Rowan covered the side of his face with his hand. Flynn’s features crumpled. The surface of Blake’s emerald eyes shattered into shards. Our grief hung heavy in the air, fresh and wet with dew. We were messed up. Completely lost. We needed Corbin to hold us together, but Corbin wasn’t here. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just… let Kelly and I help.” Jane always knew how to bring an emotional situation back to practicalities. “Hell, just answer our bloody questions. Starting with this one – I want to know why the fae tried to kill Kelly. She’s not even technically related to Maeve. She doesn’t have any powers.”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t tell you. That sixth stake was supposed to be for me.”
“You only thought that because Daigh told you so,” Aline said. “It looks as if he knew all along who he intended for the sixth stake.”
I frowned. “Why could I never see it in the dreams? If I’m a dreamwalker then I should have been able to reach that sixth stake, but I every time I got close it was like there was this invisible wall holding me back.”
The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow Page 6
