The Flame in the Mist

by Kit Grindstaff

  “I wonder whether he knows I’ve arrived here,” Jemma said, suddenly sad about him. “I wish he wasn’t stuck in that awful place. When did he first go there, anyway, and why did he stay? All they ever said about him was that he’d served ‘generations of Agromonds,’ or something pompous like that. He does look ancient, though—at least a hundred.”

  “A hundred?” said Digby, mopping his bowl with a chunk of bread. “More like two!”

  “We may never know about him,” said Sapphire. “Some mysteries remain mysteries.”

  “I wish I’d realized about him sooner, though,” Jemma said.

  Second helpings of Pedrus’s stew took them through the horrors that Jemma and Marsh had endured in the forest. Marsh told them of the terrible loss of her hand, which she’d cut off herself and tossed at the Aukron to divert it—to no avail, it turned out, since the Aukron had kept pursuing her anyway, until she eventually managed to stun it with Light. Listening to Marsh’s trials tore at Jemma’s heart and brought back the shadows of her own ordeal. They ebbed slightly in the telling, and in the healing warmth she felt from her mother. Thank goodness for Bryn and the crystals, Sapphire said, and for Majem’s cloak, book, and Stone—and of course, the rats and Digby. They had all played a vital part in Jemma getting out of Agromond Forest alive.

  “But without you, Mother,” Jemma said, “I don’t know if I’d have made it through the snowstorm that night. You saved me.”

  “We helped, it’s true. But you saved us, Jemma.”

  “What do you mean?” Jemma bit into a chunk of meat. “How?”

  “By taking those crystals that night. You released us. You see, it’s an ancient sorcerer’s spell to capture a part of an enemy’s soul and seal it in clear crystal, which they then submerge in a tincture of aqua furva—a very dark substance—to keep it hidden. The Agromonds did this to us shortly after they took you, while we were weakened by grief. Otherwise, they would never have been able to manage it. We guessed what had happened when our healing abilities vanished, and we felt so utterly drained. The Mist’s effect on us worsened too, so that we could barely venture beyond the gates of Oakstead. Worst of all, with our Vision clouded, we were unable to See you for all that time. Twelve years …” She shook her head. “We have been a fine laughing-stock for the Agromonds and their followers—more so than if we had been dead.”

  “That’s what Nox said he wanted me to be too,” Jemma said with a shudder. “So why didn’t you ask Marsh to look for the crystals when she arrived at the castle?”

  “Why, Jem,” Marsh said, “even if I’d found ’em, them Agromonds would’ve seen they’d gone in no time, an’ who but me would be guilty of takin’ ’em, eh? They’d have had my guts for garters, an’ then where would you have been for all them years, with nobody to help you when the time came? Not that I did much,” she added, “in the end.”

  “I’d have been lost without you, though.” Jemma smiled at Marsh, thinking of all that Marsh had risked. For her. For her parents. Eleven years of her life gone in that bleak place.

  “I wouldn’t ’ave had it any other way, pet,” Marsh said.

  “It’s true though, Ida,” said Sapphire. “We owe everything to you.”

  “And all that time,” Jemma said to her mother, “the crystals held a part of your spirit? That’s terrible!”

  “Yes. Until, shortly after midnight on your birthday, I felt a jolt of awakening, like quicksilver running through my very being. Your father felt it too. We knew there could be only one cause: somebody—you—had removed the crystals from the liquid. We immediately tried to communicate with you through them, but could not; the Mist still prevented us from Seeing. But little by little, our Powers began returning, and on Thursday, we felt a pull on our energy—you, being healed in Bryn’s cave, no doubt—and from then on, whenever you connected with the crystals, we were able to see you, and guide you when you asked.” Sapphire took a sip of water.

  “Like when Lok took them with Digby into Blackwater,” Jemma said. “I saw their blue light, and could follow them.”

  “Rotten rhubarb!” Digby gulped. “I din’t realize that’s how you an’ them crystals found me.”

  “Indeed,” said Sapphire, “we sensed the danger. But finally, when I felt you call upon my help with a healing in the early hours of this morning, Jemma … well, what a relief!”

  “That was Alyss—a woman we met. Thank you for helping, Mother.”

  “Oh, but I did nothing, Jemma! I merely glimpsed a few images of what was happening, and tried to visualize a good outcome for her. It was you who did the healing.”

  “It was amazin’ to watch,” said Digby. “Them’s some Powers you got, Jem!”

  Or had, Jemma thought. Her nerves rankled. Hearing first-hand about her parents’ suffering, the idea of the Agromonds’ victory began gnawing at her again. If only she and Digby had arrived in time for her Initiation, she could have sought justice, revenge—

  “Do not concern yourself with your Initiation, Jemma,” Sapphire said. “You will see—”

  “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  “When your thoughts are loud, I can hear them. Perhaps you will develop that gift someday, as well as any others that I, or your father, possess.”

  “But how?” Jemma thumped her fist on the table. “I missed my Initiation! There’s nothing to stop the Agromonds now. They’ll get away with everything they’ve done—to you, to me, to all of Anglavia. They’ve won!”

  “Jemma, they have not won!” Sapphire said. “For one thing, they no longer have you, and … well, there is more to it, but …” She wrung her hands, her eyes flecking with gray again.

  “Try to let it go for now, Jem,” said Marsh, patting her hand. “Things’ll look better in a day or two, I promise. Jus’ give your ma time to explain why.”

  “Anyways, Jem,” Digby chimed in, “like I said, I don’t think your Powers is gone at all. I told you, after you scared them hooligans off earlier—”

  “I didn’t scare them, Dig. That was the Light Game. All I did was think of it.”

  “An’ d’you s’pose if I’d thought of it, the same thing would’ve happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Jemma crossed her arms and slumped into the bench. The talk in the room fell to a hum, then to silence, as if everyone had been infected by her growing gloom. The truth was undeniable: she, their only hope, had failed them.

  Noodle and Pie stopped eating, and looked at her with their heads cocked.

  Don’t give up. Wait. You’ll see.

  Just then, through the stillness, a single chime, silvery but insistent, rang from the square outside. It reverberated from wall to wall, between the beams, the cubicles. The room froze. Then slouching bodies pulled themselves upright, faces turning to one another, and then to Jemma. Her mother’s and Marsh’s eyes widened. Noodle and Pie scampered onto Jemma’s shoulders. Digby looked as puzzled as she felt.

  “The clock!” Sapphire said. “It’s started again! Twelve years to the day—to the minute!”

  Marsh was the first to leave her seat. She bustled to the window and pulled back the curtain. “Majem be praised!” she said. “It’s true—the minute hand is at six thirty-one!”

  A murmur started from table to table, then chatter broke out, echoing Sapphire’s words: “The clock! Twelve years to the day—to the hour—to the very minute!”

  “Six thirty-one!” Pedrus shouted. “Look—six thirty-one!”

  All around the room, people leapt to their feet and tumbled out of the door shouting, “Look—six thirty-two, six thirty-two!”

  “Come,” said Sapphire, “let’s all go and see.” She took Jemma’s hand and led her outside. Marsh and Digby followed, and the four of them stood facing the square. From every house, men, women, and children emerged carrying lamps and candles and staring in wonder as the clock’s minute hand ticked forward to the next moment. Their murmurs grew, and as the minute hand clicked to six thirty-four, hundreds of voic
es raised in a cheer.

  Then one voice rose above the rest: “The Fire One—look, the Fire One has returned!”

  A hush fell over the crowd. Everyone turned to where Jemma stood flanked by her mother and Marsh. Hope emanated from every one of them—hope that flared in her too. Her entire body buzzed as an image flooded her mind: Anglavia, bathed in sunlight, free of Mist and starvation—free of Agromond oppression! There was nothing she wanted more, and it felt wildly, insanely possible. Initiation or not.

  All at once, energy surged through her like water released from a dam, breaking out of every pore of her skin and across the square. She reeled backward with the force of it, sending Noodle and Pie flying from her shoulders. Digby grabbed her arms to steady her.

  The crowd gasped. The entire square was clear of Mist.

  “Mother of Majem!” whispered Marsh.

  Sapphire’s mouth hung open. “Jemma,” she said. “What did you do?”

  Jemma gulped. “I just thought … about freeing Anglavia from the Mist. From them …”

  “See?” said Digby. “Jus’ like earlier with that amazin’ Light! An’ all you did was think it?”

  Across the square, shouts of “Bless you, Jemma!” started rising into the clear twilight air. The Mist hung back near the town gate, edging in, then pulling back, as if afraid.

  “Well, my child,” said Sapphire, “this hubbub will surely have roused your father, and no doubt witnessing this miracle will be the elixir he needs to chase any remaining weariness from his bones! So let us send for him. Ah, Ollie!” A small boy ran from the inn—another of Pedrus’ children, by the look of him. “Please, go and fetch my husband, quickly, quickly!”

  Ollie darted back inside. The crowd’s exuberance grew by the second. “Praise be! The Fire One! The Fire One has returned! Time has started again!”

  Their cheers dulled in Jemma’s head. The prospect of meeting her father suddenly seized her with the strangest mix of emotions: excitement, curiosity … and then a sense of foreboding, creeping up from her toes. She pulled up the hood of her cloak, as if it could hide her. The minutes ticked by: six thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and still the cheers droned on, thick and distant, as if through a lake of syrupwater.

  Every face, every tree, and every building in the square was still crystal clear. As crystal clear as the electric sense of someone approaching from behind her. Crystal clear as she turned around. And crystal clear as she saw the unmistakable dark hair and determined stride of Nox Agromond, exiting the inn and heading straight toward her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Bloodlines

  Jemma wheeled around, but there was nowhere to run. The crowd was too thick, and blocked her way. Hands were grabbing her from behind, pulling her back, while Digby, his expression as horrified as she felt, looked on.

  “Jem—it’s not ’im—not who you think!” Marsh’s arms, holding her up, and her mother’s, wrapping around her as her legs buckled …

  He was there. In front of her. The man they dared say was her father. Jemma’s vision pulsed, dark, light, dark, and she pushed away, gripped by absolute panic. That face … that hair … those eyes …

  Those eyes. They were not black, but blue-green. Like ocean waters.

  Like hers.

  “Jemma. My daughter.” His voice was hoarse, and soft as a breeze. “Please, fear not.…”

  Jemma fell backward into Marsh and her mother, all the dangers and uncertainty of the past eight days releasing in salty rivers down her cheeks. The tightness in her gut unwound; her heartbeat subsided. It was him who she had seen in her dream that morning, pulling her toward Oakstead—not Nox Agromond! Yes, this man’s features were similar to Nox’s, but the smile spreading across them hid no trace of deception.

  “Father …,” she croaked. “Father!”

  He reached out, and folded her into his arms.

  Eight chimes of the town clock wound through the inn’s corridors, up the narrow staircase, and into Jemma’s parents’ room. Jemma drew her knees up and settled into a cushioned wooden armchair with Noodle and Pie on her shoulders and a mug of burdock tea in her hands. Her parents sat on a rickety sofa at the other side of the small fireplace. Barely two hours had passed since she’d arrived in Oakstead, but she felt as though she had always known them, and the more she looked at her father, the more he seemed illuminated by something other than the firelight, radiating from within—something quite different from what animated Nox Agromond.

  “Father,” she said, “how is it that you look so like him?”

  “We and the Agromonds have an ancestor in common,” he said. “One who fled from them some three hundred years ago and married into our family. You know of her already, I believe. She wrote this.” He picked up an ancient-looking book from the table next to him and passed it to her.

  “From Darknesse to Light—Majem’s book! Majem Solvay was born an Agromond?”

  “Indeed she was,” said Lumo, “and as cruel as any of them, until, just before she turned thirteen, she had a change of heart. She escaped from the castle and came to Oakstead to seek the help of the Solvays living here at that time. They took her under their wing, gave her a home, and trained her in the Light Arts. Later, she and their son Valior fell in love, and wed.”

  “That must have angered the Agromonds no end! Is that why they hate us so much?”

  “Our emnity goes back hundreds of years before that, but Majem’s escape—her betrayal of them, no less—made their hatred more bitter. There was a time, though, long before, when Agromonds and Solvays ruled this land together in harmony and prosperity: the Agromonds in the south, and we, the north.” Lumo took a sip of water, and smiled. “Yes! I see your look of astonishment, Jemma, but it is so, and all told in Majem’s book. Read it, when you are ready.”

  Jemma shivered, and turned the book in her hands. “So Majem was one of them! To have been so evil, and become so good.…”

  “Nobody is evil through and through, Jemma,” said Lumo, “or good, for that matter. Each of us has the capacity for both, and for most of us, one wicked act, or even several, does not make us a wicked person. That depends upon how we choose to commit our lives. Yet even good people have the capacity for cruelty, just as evil ones have the capacity for kindness.”

  Jemma nodded, remembering her harsh words to Nox about his lost twin, and how kind he could be to her. “What caused such a change of heart in her?”

  “That too is in the book,” said her mother. “Some of it is … painful to read. Wait, at least until your ordeal has faded from your mind. Then we shall talk of it, and of the future, and tell you more about your brother, as well.”

  “My brother … What was his name?”

  Lumo and Sapphire both drew in a breath, then spoke together. “Jamem.”

  “Jamem,” Jemma repeated. Another anagram … The eerie sense of connection she’d felt to Majem threaded through her again. And now there was a third person hooked into the story. Jamem. She wanted to ask more about him, and about his disappearance, but the sorrowful looks on her parents’ faces made her think better of it. She’d only found out about his existence a few days ago, after all, while they had endured twelve years of heartache. Her questions could wait.

  Running down the crag—her silken dress ripping on branches … Screams from the castle—her father, calling her name in a strange, muddled way: “Ma-jemmajemjamem!” Would she ever be free of it all? The dungeons, the small boy’s whimpers, her father’s fury …

  Wait—this can’t be my dream! I don’t know any small boy, and my father is Lumo, Lumo Solvay! He’s never even been to the castle! And yet, it must be her—the rats were in a pouch around her shoulders, and she could see the Stone’s aqua glow. The bell began tolling, once, twice.…

  “Enough! I’m free now, free!” Jemma woke on the last strike of three, the dream details vivid in her head. The silk dress, the small boy—they weren’t her memories! They belonged to someone else. Someone long ago. So
meone who, like her, had broken free.

  “Majem,” she whispered. “It was her I was dreaming about.”

  Outside, it was still dark, but a candle stub burned by Jemma’s bedside, next to the book and crystals. Noodle and Pie were fast asleep on her pillow, their tiny snores purring like mothwings. She took stock of the patched cotton gown she was wearing, and remembered her mother bathing her just before bedtime, then bringing her here and tucking her in.

  She closed her eyes. But the evening’s events kept churning through her head: more stories she’d exchanged with her parents, then going down to the kitchen with them for a nightcap of camomile tea with Marsh and Digby. Her parents had given Digby a pony to thank him for bringing her home. Then, since he had to leave early in the morning and return to Hazebury to help his father with deliveries, Jemma had said goodbye to him.

  That had been harder than she’d expected, and she felt sad now, thinking about him. She would miss him. Her friend. Her rescuer. Her rescuee. For more than four years, they’d seen each other every Tuesday at dawn, and the past two days’ adventures had driven him deeper into her heart. He’d stood by his word to Marsh, and brought her here despite the dangers. And after all her dreaming, here she was at last, miles from Agromond Castle—but there he would be, still living in its shadow, making the weekly trudge up the crag with Gordo and Pepper to deliver the Agromonds’ supplies. Even though he’d promised to visit as soon as he could—being careful to avoid Blackwater—there was a hollow in her, a piece missing. A piece labeled “Digby.”