“Are you the fox,” I murmured, watching as his milky eyes found me. “Or are you the wren?”
“I took you in once, girl, and this is my reward?” he sputtered. He coughed, hard, and I fished the handkerchief out of his pocket, holding it to his stained lips. “Courtesy? Now? I shall never understand it.”
“You murdered my folk,” I said. The words came easily, as if practiced. I blinked, gazing a little to the right of him. Something inside me felt warm and ready, perhaps what a mother experienced when she knew ’twas time the babe came. “You were the fox. We were but stunned birds. Now we are naught but a tuft of feathers.”
He shook his head slowly. “You aren’t making sense, girl. You’re mad. You’ve killed us, killed us because you are mad.”
The warmth in me spread, up and out, but it was not troubling—quite the opposite. I didn’t know what was happening, why I could feel so much at the sight of Dalton’s death and nothing at all as this weakened old man lay expiring on the ground. His worn gray cap had fallen off his balding head, and it lay in the mud. “I am the fox now, only when I make a meal of you and yours, there will be nothing left. Not a feather. Not a foot. Not a trace of you on the land or in the air.”
“There you go,” he sighed, hacking into the cloth I held to his mouth. “Sounding as damned crazed as your father. That’s your problem, you have so much of your father in you, lass. It’s put you down a path from which there’s no”—hack—“return.”
The smile I gave him was sad, but perhaps vacant, too. I took the handkerchief away and flattened it next to his head. The blood on it had made a pattern like a fallen leaf.
“My father is all gone now,” I told him. “Our book is rewritten. Our story starts anew. Father is nothing. I carry something else. Do you know?” I watched his brow furrow, terror in his eyes even as they were filmed with blindness. “Mother told me that what you and Henry did to us broke Father, watching so many of his children die. It scorched his heart to ash. But I walked through the fire with her in the Tomb of Ancients, and the fire did not break us, it did not char us to dust, no—we walked through the fire and it forged us anew.”
He let his head fall back against his cap, though his mouth never closed. “I should have asked forgiveness for what we did. I should have made amends. I never . . . never thought this would be the way it ended. God help me. God help Henry.”
“We’re well beyond that,” I said, watching his eyelids flutter and then close. I waited, thinking perhaps I should say the prayer Mother had gifted to me through her spirit. But then I thought better of it and stood. Finch, however, had tried to show me gentility once and might have become a friend had things been otherwise. I held no real animosity toward him in my heart, and he looked almost frail, crumpled on the ground. He had already left, probably before I had even emerged from the tomb.
I knelt and crossed his arms, closed his eyes with a soft touch of fingers, then spoke the words and watched him dissolve into wings and lift again high into the sky.
Khent waited for me at the castle door, leaning against it, his wounds making him slump with fatigue, all the more because he had taken up Mother’s body and now carried it across both shoulders. Together we left the ruins behind, walking in silence down the grassy hill to the road, where the carriage and horses waited to take us back to Coldthistle House.
It would take time, I knew, for this new dark will in me to settle. But it was nothing like Father’s influence, jarring and foreign; this new voice, new perspective, felt entwined with me naturally, as if it had been there all along, a dormant fire waiting to be stoked. Mother’s spirit had changed when it became mine, and briefly I considered that, just like Father, she really was, in some sense, broken. That gave me pause, but then I sat with it, joining Khent in the driver’s box, the wind harshly cool against my face as he took us back, and I decided that yes, Mother was broken.
And so was I. So were we all. Death had changed her. Her peace had turned to passion, and now that ardor was mine to bear. If we had left the tomb unchanged, then why enter it at all? Our story was the only one to survive the tomb. I had looked into the face of the one that made us all and found only contempt, and I knew that I could not let my own folk, my own friends, look into my face and see the same.
I would play the Binders’ sordid game of lives and loss, but I would—must—change the rules. Mother taught me that. My dear, dear friends taught me that, too.
“How do you feel?” Khent asked, his voice lost amid the thunder of hooves and whistling winds.
I took the pack from my back and laid it across my lap as we chewed the ground, making haste back toward the mansion. “I only feel . . . hollow.”
“Hollow? I had meant your arm, but very well. Yes, hollow. That is all right, to be hollow. That can be filled up with hope. Or with grief.”
“Grief. Hope.” I puzzled over those words, then smiled into bracing cold. “Instead I shall choose resolve.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
1247, Unknown
There are things best left unsaid in the hours after defeat. The heart is weaker in those hours, when a vague sense of consequence becomes truth. Becomes life. Henry has asked me to try once more, to join as they travel east, following the jade caravans along the Silk Road. There are rumors—and there are always rumors—of a woman in Si-ngan who has heard the remaining riddle.
But I will not be going east. I will not be going anywhere. I cannot watch Ara bandage her eye once more while Henry writes obsessive notes and insists, first to himself, then to us, that this journey has only just begun. When I refused, he called me a coward, but this time it did not sting.
Henry, if time or circumstance or some foolish trick of luck ever brings this diary into your possession, I would have you know something. There is, in fact, one more riddle, and it goes like this:
What is a tree that needs the sun but bends and grows away from it? What is a flower that craves rain but only blooms in the desert?
You can run to the ends of this world, Henry, search in every dusty corner, ask every passing merchant, and chase down every idle rumor, but you will not find what you seek. The answers to your questions are not in a hidden tomb or an ancient book, and while my sight dims as I turn away from Roeh and my people, your sight failed a long time ago.
Your riddle is not at the end of a long road. The riddle lay before you all this time. Why live? Why go on? Why choose creation over destruction? I am glad to leave the dog with you, because perhaps, dear friend, you will one day see it in his eyes. Why choose to go on? Because that which is unconditional is eternal. You were made to be eternal, and I love you for it, if only you loved yourself with my same true heart.
As you travel east, I will go west. I think I will seek out poets and sit in their presence and listen to their sad rhymes, wondering always what cutting critique you would offer them. One day Roeh will call me back to service, and I shall go, and I will lament, over and over again, that the request has not come from you.
The house, not in turmoil but in silence, looked shattered against the fields. Not a single window remained intact, and the east tower, that closest to the border with the shepherd’s property, had collapsed. When the carriage stopped and I was on the drive again, I at last felt the extent of the damage to my body. I was bruised in places I had never been bruised before. My arm vacillated between stinging needles and numbness.
Khent lifted Mother’s body out of the carriage proper and carried her along beside me as we circled back toward the site of the battle. Corpses littered the lawn, but not our friends’. I wondered if they would stay there and rot, and I thought with weary resignation that it would fall to me to see them all on. It would do everyone good to see a display of butterflies after so much blood.
“They’re back!” Poppy, who had been resting on the ground with Bartholomew, jumped up and ran to us. “But you are hurt, Louisa, and the purple lady, too.”
I saw no sign of Niles or Giles. Or Mr. Mor
ningside and Mrs. Haylam, for that matter.
“Oh dear!” Mary, Lee, and Chijioke emerged from the kitchen at the sound of Poppy’s shouts. They rushed over and helped Khent lay Mother down on an unstained patch of grass under the kitchen awning. Mary’s eyes drifted to the bag on my back.
“It’s our book,” I told her. “The shepherd is gone and the white book destroyed.”
“Aye, they all dropped out of the sky the moment it happened,” Chijioke said. His hands were burned from the rifle muzzle, and his shirt was stained with soot. “I can’t believe you did it, that it . . . that it could even be done.”
“I saw the place where the books are made,” I explained. “There were . . . complications. To destroy the book, ours had to be remade, which meant my spirit had to be removed, which meant—”
“Another soul was needed,” Chijioke finished. It was his area of expertise, after all, and he bowed his head, sighing. “That cannot have been easy.”
“Easy!?” Mary cried. “Look at her arm! We should get you inside, and Khent, too. We can see to all your injuries and find you something to eat. Giles was badly wounded. He’s upstairs with Fathom and his brother. I do so hope he survives.”
“In a moment,” I said. “Only, is there something I could use to bind my arm up? It hurts to let it swing so.”
Chijioke patted Mary on the shoulder and then trotted into the kitchen. He returned shortly with two white sheets from the pantry and carefully lifted my arm, bracing it against my middle before using the sheets to wrap it and then swaddle me diagonally across the shoulders to keep it firmly in place.
“Thank you. Where is Mr. Morningside?”
“Behind the house,” Lee said, pointing. He stood straighter now that the Upworlders were no longer a problem. “He took Mrs. Haylam behind the house.”
“Walk with me and show me,” I said.
There was no rush now to deal with Mother’s body, and I knew Mary and Chijioke would take good care of Khent and find something for his wounds. Finding Morningside was my most urgent task, and Lee’s eyes widened in surprise at my suggestion, but he agreed, falling into step next to me as we picked our way across the hole-ridden ground and fallen Upworlders. I whistled and tapped my thigh with my good hand, and Bartholomew lifted his head, then heaved an immense doggy sigh and loped over to join us.
“Why him?” Lee asked, reaching out to stroke the dog’s head.
“You will see,” I said. “But first I must ask you something.”
We walked slowly, for we were both sapped from the fighting. His knuckles and forearms showed a boxer’s welts, and with his strange, unnatural new strength I could easily imagine how he had made himself useful in the final push of the battle. We had come so very far from nervous flirting in the library.
“Something is changed about you,” Lee observed. “I suppose anybody would be changed, after what you must have seen.”
“It’s more than that,” I admitted. The walk was not long, but I took my time. As we rounded the house, I saw across the north lawn that Mr. Morningside was indeed there, and he was finishing building a pyre, stripped of his coat and down to his shirtsleeves. The sight of him doing menial labor was like watching a hedgehog dance a gavotte. “Father is gone. Mother is with my spirit now. I’m still learning what that means, and I know you were not there to see what I became when Father took control. It was ugly, violent, wild in a way that frightened me.”
“Mary told me something of it,” Lee replied. “I couldn’t understand why you would make a deal with Mr. Morningside again, but she said it must be done.”
“Aye, and she spoke truly. It had to be done.” I paused then, watching Mr. Morningside carefully lift Mrs. Haylam’s lifeless body onto the piled wood. She had given her all to protect the house. Just like the others. It was a miracle she and Giles were the only casualties. “Do you know, I once saw a farmer burning his field. I never understood why until now. He was cleaning away the useless stuff so that new and better plants might grow. That’s how I feel now, Lee. Father was an inferno, unbridled, but Mother is quite different. This is a fire I want to set. A fire I can control.”
Lee stared at me, unblinking. “Then . . . you’re happy?”
“I didn’t say that.” I offered him a thin smile and nodded toward the pyre. “Mrs. Haylam is gone, but you’re still here. Is her magic not needed to sustain you?”
He scratched his chin at that; a bit of whiskers had started to grow there. “Chijioke thinks I might be tied more to the book than to her. I don’t feel any different now that she is dead.”
“Good,” I said softly, thinking. “That’s good. Because I own the black book now, so you are in no near danger of disappearing.”
Chapter Thirty
Mr. Morningside had just lit the kindling beneath the pyre when Lee, Bartholomew, and I reached the clearing.
He stood back from the crackle as it sparked, spread, and grew into a blaze. The flames leapt upward, chewing the too-wet wood that smoked and sent a pillar of black smoke straight up into the air, as if signaling to some distant army. With arms crossed, he watched as the fire neared Mrs. Haylam’s still body. Without Dalton’s diary, I might never have known how long they had been together, or how closely their lives were linked. I couldn’t help thinking of what she had told me as the battle against the Upworlders raged around us, that she should’ve been firmer with him, as if she were a mother and not his devoted follower.
Maybe, in a sense, she had been his guardian. And now, with all of his ancient friends gone, he was adrift, unanchored.
We did not make a stealthy approach, and he twisted at the hips, perhaps simply expecting employees of the house. His whole manner changed when he saw me there with the Dark Fae book still strapped to my back. He dropped his arms and frowned, then smiled, then frowned again as I advanced.
“I’m deeply sorry about Mrs. Haylam, about your friend,” I said.
“Me, too. She was a loyal companion to the end, and such a feature of my life that her demise seemed impossible.” Mr. Morningside looked away and back into the fire. “But you’ve returned and the battle has ended, which means—”
His brows lifted in anticipation.
“Yes,” I told him. “The white book is no more.”
“Then . . . it’s over,” he said, staring off into the forest. “It’s over.”
“I am sorry about your friend. Friends,” I continued. “Or rather, I’m sorry that you lost them this way. That they tried to help you, believed you, and all along you were just using them. And I’m sorry about the house. I know it will be difficult for you to lose it.”
“Lose it?” he repeated. It wasn’t until that moment that Mr. Morningside took note of Lee’s presence. He stepped away from the pyre and toward us, studying Lee with more interest, golden eyes aglow. “My dear Louisa, you haven’t even given me the chance to fulfill my end of the deal. It will be more difficult, surely, with Mrs. Haylam gone, but not impossible.”
“Indeed. The contract, do you have it?” I asked, then continued on before he could answer. “There’s no need. I remember the wording precisely. You were to remove Father’s spirit from me. You. If that did not come to pass, then Coldthistle House and the Black Elbion would be mine.”
In his eagerness to respond, he smiled, then crooked one finger under his jaw and hesitated. “I’m sure you’re just itching to explain your reasoning.”
“You cannot remove what is already gone,” I said, advancing on him. He looked startled, truly startled, and perhaps it was not until that moment that he realized how unlikely it was for me to have returned at all. Swallowing hard, he then also noticed Bartholomew. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but nothing came out. That was well enough, for I wasn’t yet interested in what he had to say. He was at his most dangerous when he poured honeyed words into one’s ears. “Mother is dead. All of the Upworlders are dead. And I would be dead, too, were it not for luck and strange coincidence. This is what you wanted, i
sn’t it? Centuries of planning and plotting, moving us—the pieces in your little game—with promises and lies. Now that we’ve come to the end of your game, will you answer a riddle for me, Devil?”
His lip curled into a sneer, and he glanced toward the pyre as if to shame me for causing a scene in front of the dead. “Go on.”
“Arms to embrace, yet no hands. Pinches to give, yet no fingers. Poison to wield, yet no needle.” I put my hand lightly on Bartholomew’s furry head and scratched. “What am I?”
Had I eyes that penetrated his skull, I might have seen all the wheels turning, all the quick calculations as he stewed over his answer. And were he a teakettle, steam would have clotted his ears, everything suddenly too hot. Mr. Morningside shifted his weight and crossed his arms again, tipping back his chin in an imperious manner that reminded me instantly of Malatriss. That didn’t go in his favor, either.
“A scorpion,” he said.
“Lying or inept, I hardly know if it matters anymore.” I nudged the giant shaggy dog at my side, snapping my fingers in Mr. Morningside’s direction. “Go on, Bartholomew. Is he telling the truth? Does he really think that’s the answer? Or did he hope, secretly, that I would lose a finger for his error, that I would fail or die and become one less mess to sweep up?”
“It isn’t so, Louisa. If I told you something in error, it was not intentional. I wanted dearly for you to succeed!”
Bartholomew glanced up at me with his seeking eyes, puppyish, while Morningside snorted, then stumbled backward, his own gaze widening with shock as the dog leapt toward him. He knocked Mr. Morningside off his feet, startling all of us, and then crawled over his body, the stiffer fur along the dog’s spine standing up, rigid. His lips peeled back, showing finger-length teeth, and his eyes, normally so sweet, had gone feral with purpose.
“Louisa—” I heard Lee murmur.
“Just watch.”
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