“Mom!” The word seemed ripped from Ash.
“Don’t call me that, Ash,” Lillian snapped. “I’ll be dead; we both have to face that. Rob crosses the threshold of Aurimere and takes the town over my dead body. That is the responsibility I inherited from my mother; that is the bargain of our town. Before I surrender Sorry-in-the-Vale, I will die. And I cannot allow the only Lynburns left to be Rob and Rosalind. So you and Jared cannot take part in the battle tomorrow. You have to get out of Sorry-in-the-Vale and gather your resources; then you can come back and crush him.”
She sat down in one of the high-backed gold chairs, crossing her legs and turning her face away from her son. There was another hush among the group, as there had been when they realized that Henry had come alone. It sank in for all of them that Lillian had basically told them that she believed she was going to lose.
Lillian looked around the room. “Where are the others? The Prescott girl and the good-looking one?”
“Baby,” said Rusty, “I’m right here.”
Lillian gave him a horrified look, then bent her gaze on Kami, who said, “Holly and Angela are talking to some of the sorcerers who haven’t chosen a side yet. You told us that we were excluded from your plans, so we made our own.”
Under Lillian’s gaze, Kami wished she had sat on one of the high-backed gold chairs as well, though Lillian’s head would still have been well above hers, and Lillian would still have been able to look down her nose. However, Kami felt she would have had more dignity than she currently did, sitting small and alone, practically lost in a slightly cracked leather sofa.
Jared broke ranks behind Henry and strode over to Kami, crossing the room under her startled gaze. She thought he was coming to sit beside her, but instead he slung himself to the floor and sat at her feet, one arm clasped loose around his drawn-up knee and his head bent toward her. She could have reached out and ruffled his hair.
Lillian looked both taken aback and displeased. Kami was a little taken aback herself, but she supposed it was a gesture aimed at Lillian, and she touched his shoulder lightly in thanks. “If I said that I was ready to hear your plans now . . . ,” Lillian proposed, her face impassive.
“I haven’t been holding back to punish you,” Kami said helplessly. “We’ve been practicing how to fight more effectively against sorcerers. I’ve been trying to find out about Matthew Cooper, and Elinor and Anne Lynburn, because they were able to defend the town once.”
“Against some ordinary king’s pathetic soldiers,” Lillian sneered.
Henry stared at her, as the only one who was unused to Lillian acting as if she lived in the 1700s. Then he looked away, at his own hands, twisting them together against the white stone of the mantelpiece, where flowers and drowning women tangled together in a marble river.
“It was brave of you to come,” Kami told him. “Alone, and for strangers. We all owe you more than we could ever repay.”
“Let’s show Henry to his room,” Ash suggested
Henry looked grateful for the reprieve. They walked toward the door, sweeping him away in their rush.
“You could always come back to our place if you don’t fancy Aurimere,” Rusty suggested.
“That’s okay,” Henry said, giving Rusty a look of relief that there was another guy around that wasn’t a Lynburn. “But, er, thank you. So I gather things aren’t going terribly well?” His green eyes, unexpectedly bright behind his glasses, sought Kami’s.
“Not terribly,” she said. She felt distant, part of her still in the next room with Lillian, remembering her talk with businesslike valor about a last stand. “This is so stupid,” she exclaimed. “We can’t go out there with less than half the amount of sorcerers Rob has and try to face him down in the town square. We need to take Rob and the others by surprise.”
Henry blinked three times in quick succession. Kami looked away from him, let her eyes slide to where they wanted to go and catch on Jared’s face. He was already looking at her.
“Let’s go,” Jared said.
Kami smiled back at him, a current of excitement passing between them.
Ash said heavily, “My mother would never agree.”
They all knew it was true. She was set on her sorcerers’ battle, on a display of strength before the town. They had a better chance with Lillian than without her, and the very few sorcerers they had would follow Lillian’s lead.
“Well,” said Kami, “at the very least, we need to make sure all Lillian’s sorcerers have the advantages we can give them. Holly and Angela are on it, but we need to all be talking to them. We need to give them the bags we made. Ash should take the ladies, because he’s charming.”
Ash looked pleased. Jared raised his eyebrows.
“Are you saying that I’m not a charmer?”
“You are very dear to me, but you have all the savoir faire of a wildebeest,” Kami told him.
“A wildebeest,” Jared repeated.
“A dashingly handsome wildebeest,” Kami assured him. “Now let’s go call on some sorcerers. Bring me a revolution.”
She looked away from him and saw Rusty’s glance from her to Jared, alert for a moment. The Lynburn boys withdrew in opposite directions, while Kami sidled over to Rusty.
“Don’t look at me like you know something,” she said. “You don’t know something.”
“I know many things,” Rusty told her. “I am a very great genius. I’m going to go charm some people too. I may not be a Lynburn, but I am the most charming mofo in town.” He gave her a hug and said, “Take care of yourself, Cambridge,” in an unusually serious way.
For a moment she thought he was warning her about Jared, but then she realized that this could be one of the last times they saw each other. Rusty smoothed a hand down Kami’s hair and she hugged him back, and could not watch as he left. She looked away instead, and caught Henry’s eye.
“You seem to have a lot of friends,” Henry said, a little wistfully. “Must be nice. Being a—what I am—it’s hard to get close to people. I always thought that Sorry-in-the-Vale, where magic was an open secret, I thought that it would be amazing. Meeting a Lynburn, sorcerers who can do things like in the stories, I thought it would be like meeting a legend.”
“Ah,” said Kami. “Sorry about Lillian, then.”
Henry smiled, a slight smile that disappeared almost as soon as it was born. “She’s a lot better than Rob,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it when he called me and asked me to come to Sorry-in-the-Vale. I thought he was going to show me something wonderful. And instead he killed a helpless animal in front of me. He told me all magic ended in blood.” Henry shivered as if he was back in that night, watching his dreams turn to ash and blood. “I don’t want to believe that about sorcery,” he said. “I don’t want to believe that about myself. I mean, I’m a vegetarian.”
Kami laughed quietly, but not to mock him. “I know about magic that is nothing like that,” she said. “And I know a few sorcerers. They’re just people who can do an extra thing. All right, a high percentage of them seem to be lunatics, but I think that’s down to being Lynburns and seriously inbred.”
Henry laughed in his turn, a quick startled laugh. “I thought there must be something else to magic besides the blood,” he said. “I wanted to prove that there was. And then you called.”
“And you proved it,” Kami told him, and patted his arm. “I’m sorry about hitting you with a chair, Henry. You’re good people.”
Henry shrugged, minimally. “I’m sorry for threatening your friend with a gun.” He looked around and added, “This is some place, Aurimere. My mother had never seen it, but she and her friend who was a sorcerer, they used to talk about it. Like you’d talk about Camelot.”
They both looked around then: at the hall outside the library with its dark carved doors, the glass windows stained crimson and white, and the shining flight of stairs that led up to the ebony- and ivory-inlaid representation of a woman by a pool. It was imposing, terrifying, and someti
mes beautiful, but it did not look like a place where good things happened. There was so much of Aurimere, like the sorcerers’ magic, that was tainted.
Neither of them had mentioned the fact that Henry might have come here to die, that Rob might have been right after all. This magic might well end in blood.
* * *
Even though she was supposed to call Mrs. Thompson Aunt Ingrid, Holly had always been slightly afraid of her. Not for any reason, just in the way kids are of old people, the span of a whole lifetime stretching between the two points where they stood.
She was trying not to be afraid as she crossed the threshold of the sweetshop where “Aunt Ingrid” worked. She was mostly succeeding, because Angie was with her.
It was much more difficult to be scared with Angela striding at your side. It became less difficult when Holly saw that with Mrs. Thompson was Ms. Dollard, the headmistress of their school.
Holly was okay at school, and actually good at some subjects, but she always felt like Ms. Dollard thought that was a fluke and was studying Holly’s clothes to see what she was wearing that was against regulations. Kami talked to Ms. Dollard like she was a friend, and Angie stared through her as if she was a nuisance. Holly didn’t know how they dared.
Especially since now it seemed that Ms. Dollard was a sorceress.
“Well, hello,” Angie drawled. “Having a little conference about the evil taking over our town? Have the words ‘We’re totally screwed’ come up yet?”
“Angela Montgomery, don’t talk like that,” said Ms. Dollard. Her dark hair, streaked with gray, was in a short bob, and she wore expensive earrings: she didn’t look so different from when they were in school, except that she was wearing jeans. “And don’t interfere with things that don’t concern you.”
Mrs. Thompson—Aunt Ingrid—said nothing, but her eyes on Angie were not friendly. Surprise and fear burst in Holly at the same time: a new feeling, not being scared for herself but very specifically for someone else.
Angie was a stranger in Sorry-in-the-Vale, and she had no magic.
Holly put a hand on Angie’s wrist, soothing and restraining and on her side all at once. “Doesn’t this concern all of us, Aunt Ingrid?” she asked, using the name very deliberately. “We want to help.”
“How can you?” Aunt Ingrid asked.
Angela slipped her wrist out of Holly’s hold and strode across the floor. She walked like Lillian Lynburn, but Lillian had magic and Aurimere at her back. All Angie had was defiance of the whole world, but she made it work. Nobody could look anywhere else as she tossed two small dark bags, tied with twine, on the countertop.
“Things from Rob’s sorcerers,” she said. “Hair, blood, possessions. Anything we could get. You’re sorcerers, aren’t you? You can use these to protect yourselves. You can use them to fight . . . if you decide to fight.”
“This is for Sorry-in-the-Vale,” Holly said. “For the whole town.”
“I know that, girl,” said Aunt Ingrid. She picked up the two bags and laid them on the scales where she measured out gumdrops and peppermint swirls. “Clever idea.”
“Kami Glass’s,” said Angie, sounding proud. Holly wished Angie had a reason to sound like that, talking about her.
Ms. Dollard smiled at the name and touched one of the bags.
“That girl’s a pistol,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Seems like all three of you girls are set on getting into as much trouble as you possibly can.” She didn’t seem angry about it. Holly thought, actually, that it might be the first time Aunt Ingrid had looked at her with some approval.
Holly and Angie exchanged a slow smile.
“I guess we don’t mind getting into trouble,” Holly said, “as long as we get things done.”
* * *
After Kami was done handing out the spelled bags to sorcerers, she went back up to Aurimere and spent hours in the records room reading up desperately on Matthew Cooper, as if there might be some clue hidden in plain sight she was going to find at the eleventh hour. She just needed something to do so she would not go mad waiting.
There were some papers, obviously newer, white instead of yellow and with ink still blue instead of brown, which she had skipped over. She looked at them now and saw the year 1485 written in royal blue across the snowy white. If someone had wanted to preserve the records, and some of the older pages had crumbled or decayed almost past reading, transcribing them made sense.
Kami looked through them, hope surging in her chest, and saw it was just a long list of presents to the Lynburns that seemed to be payment. On the side was written “for the harvest.” She had seen that a lot in the records already, gifts given for good weather and luck with the animals and land. This harvest must have been pretty great, because the list of gifts to the Lynburns was long. It ended in “silk for the Lady Anne’s shroud, for she is drowned and lost, and will be buried by our farthest wall. Their memories lie under Matthew Cooper’s stone and wrapped in Anne Lynburn’s silk.”
Drowned in the Crying Pools, perhaps? But there was nothing else.
So much for eleventh-hour discoveries. Kami leaned her head in her hand. She’d been certain that Matthew Cooper and the Lynburn sisters had been the key to something. She still felt certain of it, but she did not know how to unlock the mystery. She did not know if she could trust her own instinct, and they were out of time.
The world outside the wall of windows had gone black as ink by the time Jared came up from the town and joined her in the records room. She’d given up on the contents of the records table and was standing at the windows watching the light in the sky die out completely when the door opened, and Jared was there at last. He looked as tired as she felt.
The wall of windows seemed to have captured the lights of the room, holding brightness trapped in its yellow panes like something in a display case. Beyond the windows was absolutely opaque blackness, as if the rest of the world had been cut away.
Kami watched Jared walking slowly across the room to her. It was oddly peaceful for a moment, just to watch him and stop thinking. He’d taken off his jacket and he was wearing a light, pale gray jumper. His eyes looked darker gray in comparison, shadowed and troubled but steady.
Here he was, the one of the younger Lynburn generation who people automatically took a step back from rather than a step toward. Like one of the marble Lynburn busts or one of the Lynburn paintings come to rough, vivid life: her imaginary friend and constant dream come to life.
When he closed the distance between them, not touching her but with his face bent down to hers, she turned up her face to his with only inches and light between them and felt like she had been waiting years for this. Here he was, at last.
“If you want to storm Monkshood Abbey right now, just you and me, I’m in,” he said.
“That would be a suicide mission. And before you say it, I know you would go on a suicide mission,” Kami said. “And how do I know that? Because you go on them all the time. It’s like the Land of Suicide Mission is your favorite holiday destination.”
Don’t do it anymore, she thought. Try to be safe.
Jared’s eyes scanned her face. “You don’t have to worry,” he said softly. “I never wanted to die. I only wanted to be useful somehow. I would have done anything, and I was unhappy enough that I didn’t care what happened to me.”
“But you do care now,” Kami said unsteadily.
“Yes,” Jared told her. “I care now.”
He touched her then, not to kiss her but to put his hand on the small of her back, draw her in against his body. He was solid against her, lean muscle supporting her weight. Kami rested her cheek against the soft material of his jumper.
“I like your jumper,” she said into it.
“You like my what?” Jared asked. Kami tugged at his sleeve in response and he laughed. “In the civilized land of the Americas, we call that a sweater. A jumper is a dress. You might as well have just said, ‘Why, Jared, what a fetching frock you’re wearing today.’ ”
>
“Why, Jared, what a fetching frock you’re wearing today,” Kami said instantly, raising her head so she could lift her face up to his. “You look ever so pretty.”
Jared laughed, a soft huff of breath, and rested his forehead gently against hers. “Your frock’s fairly fetching as well.”
Kami closed her eyes, embarrassed to let him see she was happy he’d noticed. “Thanks.”
“Not as fetching as mine, of course,” Jared added. “I am the prettiest.”
Kami pushed him with no force behind it, because she did not want him even a fraction of an inch farther away. “One of the few reasons to be glad you came to Sorry-in-the-Vale. We live until summer, and you can make your bid to be Queen of the May.”
“Kami,” Jared said, “I could never be sorry I came. No matter what happens. I want you to remember that. I’ll always be glad.”
Kami punched him hard enough to make him stumble back a step and let go of her.
“You jerk,” she said.
Jared looked extremely surprised.
“You could never be sorry?” Kami repeated. “You want me to remember that? No matter what happens? Don’t you dare give me the soldier-marching-off-to-his-death speech. That’s rubbish. Remember this, Jared Lynburn. I will not let you die.”
Jared started to laugh, a quiet but real laugh, tipping his head back against the golden glass. Then he reached forward, still leaning against the glass, snagged the material of her dress at her waist, and pulled her in toward him.
She slid her arm around his neck and felt the curl of his hair against the nape, the solid press of his body against her, and thought, Real, and mine. It was enough. “I have to go,” Kami said. “I should go home.”
It occurred to her after she said it that he might ask her to stay. Kami had been stroking his hair; now her hands closed, one on the warmth of his neck and one in the waving ends of his hair, getting a grip on him. Panic and anticipation wound through her, twined. She did not know how to untangle them. The idea was like cupping a burning coal in her hands, shifting it from palm to palm, and yet the brightness of it held her eyes and she could not bear to put it down.
Untold Page 23
