A Harvest of Hearts

15

I spat onto the dusty floor, a repellent glob of saliva and spicy, sorcerous blood that left my mouth as numb as if I’d been sucking on cloves. When I put my hand to my shoulder, it came away wet with my own blood. Clarissa’s nails had been sharp.

I tried to slow my breathing and clear my thoughts. I was kneeling, I discovered, but on dirty floorboards now. I looked to the side and saw that Colin was sprawled beside me. Only the faint up-and-down movement of his spine showed that he was alive and breathing. One of my hands still gripped his ankle like a manacle, so tightly that I could see his skin reddening around it. Cornelius was at my other side, quite composed.

“You did it,” he purred. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to.”

“I almost couldn’t,” I said. I patted myself down, less to check for injury than for the reassurance that I still existed, that I hadn’t left a leg or an arm somewhere between the two Houses. I felt watery and weak, fuzzy about the edges, as if the journey had stripped me of something essential.

As I calmed myself and steadied my breathing, however, I started to feel solid again. I was still here—me, Foss, the one unchanging, unchangeable thing in all this magic mess.

“She was going to harvest me,” I said. “Something stopped her.”

“You bit her.”

“No, before that. She tried, and couldn’t.”

“Well, whatever it was,” mewed Cornelius practically, “We made it.”

There was none of that black stuff to be seen. We stood in a drafty hallway (which was a relief, honestly, after the stifling warmth of the House), laced with very impressive cobwebs and smelling of a fair amount of damp—and thick vines everywhere, twisting and dark.

I let my eyes travel slowly from one unfamiliar corner to another. It was lavishly coated with dust, like an old woman puffing on her face powder with a too-heavy hand. Every surface was furred and blurred with layers of it. Clearly, no one had come here for a long time—the dust was undisturbed except for a few of Cornelius’s paw prints.

“This is what the House really looks like?” I asked.

“No,” said Cornelius.

“But you said ...”

“It really looks like this, and it really looks like the other thing,” said Cornelius, twitching his tail. “They’re both real, at the same time.”

“And one is on top of the other?”

“No,” he said, exasperated. “I told you. They’re both in the same place, at the same time.”

I suppose I had to accept that both places could exist at once in exactly the same space, but I did wonder what I had been sleeping on for the past month in this Other House. A nest of hay and field mice, perhaps? It made my head hurt to think about it.

“Don’t think about it too hard,” warned Cornelius. “It might be listening.”

“Can the magic-workers follow us?” I asked. “They have magic. If I can get here, surely they can get here too.”

“I don’t think so,” said Cornelius. “Probably because there’s no magic in it at all. It’s the absence of their magic, if you see what I mean. There’s nothing they can draw on in here to do their castings, so it’s beneath their notice, so to speak.”

So, there was one place safe from their spiderweb of spells. I found I could breathe easier, stand straight. That constant, nagging presence of the heartsickness was not quite entirely gone, but it was certainly lessened. I took in a deep breath of air, then immediately regretted it when the dust set me to coughing and spluttering.

When my vision cleared, I could still see the dust swirling about me. I thought of hiding in here indefinitely, escaping the spell that way, but from what I could see, there was no way to survive.

Nothing lived besides the twisting vines, and there was no water source that I could see. Unless Cornelius could somehow be persuaded to bring me supplies every day for the rest of my natural-born life, which wouldn’t be much fun for either of us.

I pressed my fingers to Colin’s wrist. His pulse was still there—faint, thready, but even. “We have to get out of here. We have to leave. Clarissa is going to kill us both.”

“We’re leaving for good, then?” asked Cornelius.

“We have to.” I ignored the pain that leaped up as soon as I thought about leaving Sylvester. You’re not real, I told it sternly.

“Where will we go?”

“We won’t be able to get back to my village. Not straight away,” I said. “The sorcerer cast a spell that makes the heartsickness come in waves, but it won’t work if I go that far. I’ll get sick again. We’ll go to the secret society people I talked to. They’re the best chance we’ve got.”

“All right,” said Cornelius, “if they have food.”

“I think they had sardines last time,” I said.

He brightened. “Let’s go.”

I looked at Cornelius doubtfully.

“Once we get outside, I suppose I’ll have to carry you in my arms,” I said. “Unless you have any better ideas. It would look pretty odd to have a cat trotting alongside me.”

“Put me in a pocket, then,” he suggested. “The ones in your cloak are big enough.”

“Really? That doesn’t sound too comfortable.” Or dignified. I knew how Cornelius valued his dignity.

“Just until dark,” he said. “Then I can come out, and no one will be any the wiser. I’m good at being invisible.”

“Remember, you won’t be able to talk to me once we’re out of here,” I said. There was a pocket in my voluminous skirt plenty big enough for a smallish cat, and lined with velvet, which was a nice touch. I held it open so Cornelius could take a look.

“Looks comfortable enough,” he said, “for a little while.”

“Then we’ll both be comfortable for a little while.” I tried to speak lightly, but I felt a weight settle on me. I would not survive too long away from the sorcerer, I knew, no matter what I told myself about the secret society and their supposed magical friend who could heal hearts. Still, dying in a ditch was infinitely better than letting Clarissa reach between my ribs with her pointed nails and harvest me herself.

“Let’s go,” said Cornelius.

“Wait,” I said. I nudged at Colin with my toe.

“I think you should leave him,” said Cornelius. “He’ll be safe enough.”

“I can’t leave him.” I grabbed him under the armpits. He was startlingly light, like a child. Hollowed out , I thought. He groaned. I heaved him up and supported him on one shoulder.

“He’s coming with us,” I insisted. “We’ll get out of here, and go to the secret society, and get the name of that person who repairs hearts. And she’ll fix us up, me and Colin.”

I spoke with more certainty than I felt.

“You only have one heart in your pocket,” Cornelius pointed out. “Don’t you need one for each of you?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Fine, if you want to lug him about. Let’s get moving, then.”

“How do we get out , though?” I asked, looking around. The place looked like it was about to cave in at any minute. “Is there a way to get to the street from here?”

“I don’t know,” said Cornelius. “But I’ll follow my nose, and we’ll find out.”

Walking through the Other House was an unsettling experience. The ceiling seemed to bulge downward with the damp. Spiders scuttled overhead. Colin was a deadweight against my side.

I thrust my hand into one of my pockets and found the little raven seal I had bought from Basil’s stall. My one souvenir, if you didn’t count Cornelius. I also had a knife, out of habit.

I had always carried one at home and in the shop, and I had nabbed one from the House’s kitchen to ferry about with me in the House in the same manner. It was black, of course, with an ornate handle, barely larger than a paring knife, and its sharp edge was a comfort to me.

Cornelius followed his nose, and I followed Cornelius. There seemed to be no logic to the arrangement of this place. We might as well have been in a labyrinth. I voiced this to Cornelius, and he gave his odd cat shrug. “It’s not so bad. I come here sometimes just for a change of scenery. Look for mice, eat a few spiders. Sleep in the rafters.”

The walls shimmered oddly when our shadows fell on them, as if they were deciding whether or not to be solid. “Is that normal?” I said, pointing at them with my free hand.

“Just ignore them,” said Cornelius. “If you pay too much attention, you’ll go back.”

“That’s reassuring,” I panted. Even though Colin wasn’t that heavy, he was limp and uncooperative, and it was becoming a strain to support him.

The place made a sort of groan, like the creaking of an old tree in a bad storm. The spiderwebs quivered. And what happened to the spiders, when the sorcerer’s House was taking up this space, I wondered?

“Stop thinking ,” said Cornelius sharply, as if he could hear me.

“It’s a human thing,” I protested. “It’s hard to stop.”

Cornelius gave a disgusted sniff that summed up all his opinions regarding humans.

“Why is it shaking, though ?” I asked. “Is this usual?”

“Not as far as I know. The sorceress may be looking for us, I suppose.”

“That’s not very comforting. What if she brings the place down around our ears?”

“Not much we could do about it,” he said.

I did my best to ignore my thoughts and just concentrate on following Cornelius’s tail down this new corridor.

“How do you know where you’re going?” I asked. My breath was coming shallowly.

“I just do,” said Cornelius, and looked back over his shoulder. “It’s a cat thing,” he added ironically. “It’s hard to stop.”

The Other House was not the same shape as the sorcerer’s House, exactly, but there did seem to be points where the two were a little closer together, like two streams of water flowing into one.

In these places, the walls shimmered more decidedly, as if the wood and plaster had become a curtain between one place and the next, that you could draw aside with your hand. I avoided looking at the shimmer for too long lest, as Cornelius had said, I sent us back to the House before we were ready.

The magical House seemed to be wrapped around this one like a vine choking a tree, stifling what it used to be, but there was a hint of life left. Standing in one of the abandoned rooms, I felt a twinge that told me this was the kitchen, in the same way you might see the memory of old beauty in a wrinkled face.

We pushed open a door that seemed to have been long shut—or tried to. Something pushed back. I put my head down and shoved it as best as I could while still supporting Colin, and with a great sound of crackling and snapping, whatever was behind it gave way, and I practically fell through into a cloud of dust and plant matter.

The corridor behind the door was choked with dead and dying vines, crowding every inch of space, and smelling of rot and must. Cornelius sneezed. “I haven’t seen this bit before,” he said.

“It looks familiar,” I said. I had dreamed something like this, before coming to the city and then again during my heartsickness fevers. Those long, black corridors, so like the House, and those tunnels of vines. I felt a shiver.

“Well, my nose tells me this is the way out,” said Cornelius. “So we’ll have to push through.”

We picked our way through the vines, most of which were dead and dry, but some of which still had a little bend and juice to them.

Colin had woken a little, enough to move his limbs sluggishly, but he kept getting tangled up in the vines and coming to a standstill, his eyelids flickering and his mouth hanging open as if he were still half asleep.

The vines were covered with little thorns that reached out with malicious hands to snag clothing and skin. I had to use my little knife to cut him free several times, and the thorns left my hands crisscrossed with red lines and bright beads of blood. I cussed and muttered as I tried to maneuver Colin through each new obstacle.

“Just leave him,” Cornelius kept saying. “He’s barely alive as it is. I can smell it.”

“I can’t just leave him,” I grunted, lifting each of his legs in turn to guide him over a particularly nasty muddle of vines, tangled all together like a nest of snakes. “Barely alive is still alive. We might still be able to help him.”

Humans, I could hear Cornelius thinking, but he said no more and even helped to free a trapped piece of clothing with his little teeth.

“We’re nearly at the door,” he said. “I can feel it.”

I didn’t know if we would be able to get to the Outside from this House, or whether we would have to pass back into the sorcerer’s House to do so. All these layers of reality, one on top of the other like folded pastry! I couldn’t keep them straight in my head. What if there was another House beneath this one, and another beneath that, and . . .

The walls shivered. The vines rattled their thorns.

“You’re thinking too much again,” hissed Cornelius.

“Sorry,” I said. I hefted Colin past a last mess of thorns. We both looked like we’d lost a fight with a pack of rabid weasels. Our clothing was tattered and blood-smeared, and our skin was cut to ribbons.

There was a door in front of us, small and narrow, like the door to a cupboard. It certainly didn’t look important or large enough to be the door to the Outside, but Cornelius trusted his nose, and I was coming to trust it too, so I supposed it might be the key to our escape.

I put out my hand for the handle, and the Other House roared around me, a roar that wasn’t exactly sound but managed to be deafening nonetheless. I clapped my hands to my ears, letting go of Colin, who staggered but miraculously managed to stay upright.

It sounded like all the boards and dust and spiders and vines had swirled themselves up into a maelstrom. The door spun in front of me like clay on a potter’s wheel, the handle a black blur at one edge.

“Why is it like this?” I panted, struggling to stay upright. “Why won’t it let us out ?”

“It doesn’t like the House being in its space, I think,” said Cornelius, his voice also straining. “I suppose it thinks we’re part of it.”

“It thinks ?”

“It’s kind of ... shoved under the House,” said Cornelius. “By the sorcerer’s magic. And it doesn’t like it.”

“Wonderful,” I said between my teeth. “Let’s get out before it figures out how to crush us.”

Fighting the wall of soundless sound, I reached out again and grasped for the door handle. Astonishingly, I found the smooth curve of the handle in my palm, the chaos stopped, and I was able to open the door.

“Let’s go before it changes its mind,” huffed Cornelius, a little out of breath.

He jumped through, seemingly with no difficulty. I pushed Colin through first, then followed. The door pulsed around me, unpleasantly warm and tight, but then I was free and standing in the sorcerer’s courtyard. It was night. It was not possible for it to be night—not enough time had passed.

“I forgot to mention,” said Cornelius. “Time does seem to pass differently in there.”

“How differently?” I asked. “Is it tonight? Tomorrow night? A hundred years later?”

He snorted. “Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “We’ve probably only lost a few hours. But we need to go.”

I nodded, but looked back, just once, as all the fairytales tell you not to do. I had to go, I knew that much, before I ended up with a rotten peach pit in my chest and my heart in a jar.

I had thought to myself previously—staring at the ceiling in the early hours of the morning, contemplating the fix I was in—that perhaps I could carve out some sort of hollow life, as Dav had, and live out my shortened days with no husband or sweetheart, sobbing in pubs until the rot took me.

Hells, that’s probably what would have happened to me anyway, even if I’d never encountered the sorcerer at all. It would just happen a little faster now, that was all, with whatever this spreading mold was, if indeed I had become infected like the others.

But the thought of leaving Sylvester was almost unbearable. I hated myself for it. I knew the love I felt for the sorcerer was artificial, not a real attachment.

I would be Sylvester’s footstool, his nursemaid, I would scrub out his privies, just so I could stay near him and feel that nonsensical and unearned happiness that his presence gave me, false or no. To be leaving—really leaving—felt impossible. I told myself not to think about it, to just keep walking.

We ran across the courtyard to the outer wall, hurrying, lest the magic-workers feel our presence, and wrenched at the handle of the final door.

Colin had roused himself enough to move on his own and keep up with us, but he still seemed little more than a hollow puppet, trailing along after us as if attached by strings.

We stepped out into the same old night as always, and the black door closed with a hollow clonk behind us, shutting me away from the sorcerer and the sorcerer away from me. For good. I imagined I could actually feel the severing, like something snapping in my chest, but of course, it was my imagination.

I wondered if he and his sister were still inside the House, or whether she had dragged him off somewhere to force him to harvest his “quota,” however many hearts that was supposed to be. I would probably never know now.

I held the pocket at my waist open for Cornelius to jump in, and once I felt his weight settle into it, I walked as fast as I could away from the House without actually running, fearful that I would change my mind, let my heart overpower my good sense, and turn back.

Either that, or I’d hear the clip-clop of the sorceress’s heels coming after me. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

Once I felt we had gained enough distance, I held Colin’s arm within mine, hoping that we could pass for two sweethearts out walking. Even if one of the sweethearts looked like he could keel over at any minute.

The streets were only dimly lit by lanterns here, and as we got farther down toward the walls, there would be no light at all, so hopefully people wouldn’t be able to look at us too closely.

“Are you all right?” asked Cornelius from inside the pocket. “You look a little green.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and then realized something. “You can still talk!”

I looked around, but there were few people on the street; it was so late. No one turned their head to see where the voice at my waist-level was coming from.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m not sure how long it will last, so we should make the most of it in case it goes away.”

“All right.” So, the spells were holding so far—both mine and Cornelius’s. He could still talk, and I did not yet feel the full pain of separation from the sorcerer.

It had all happened so quickly and perhaps that was for the best. I didn’t have time to grieve for Sylvester and maunder over him. This was the easiest way, I told myself—a clean break, with no time to hem and haw about it.

As we set off for Oyster Lane, we attracted few curious glances. We were just two more cold, preoccupied pedestrians among many others. It didn’t seem long before I was down in the reeking lower roads of the city, picking my way through the damp, unpleasantly squishy refuse to get to the old tavern.

Cornelius kept silent, protesting only a little when I stumbled over an uneven cobblestone or turned a corner too abruptly.

The heartsickness had only just started to kick in when we turned onto Oyster Lane itself, thank goodness, and again seemed less than before. I suppose this meant the sorcerer still held the spell, like one of his cats’ cradles, rather than letting it fall and fail once I had disappeared to the Other House.

I wasn’t sure what this signified. Had he simply forgotten that he was protecting me and hadn’t thought to undo his working? Whatever his reasons, I was grateful for it and hoped that it would hold at least while I was in the city, before I traveled too far from him to sustain it.

“There it is,” I said, spotting the old tavern. Cornelius poked his head out to look.

“Smells like fish here,” he said with approval.

“Smells worse inside,” I said. I gave Colin a little shake, to see if he had perked up any. His eyes flickered, and he let out what could have been a groan or just a sigh.

“We’re here, Colin,” I said in the falsely bright, cheery voice you use for little children. “They’ll fix you right up.”

I hoped that some of the Snagged would be there. Basil had said they were there most evenings, and so my odds were good. When I knocked, however, the swift opening of the door startled me, and I almost fell inside. Cornelius let out a tiny mew.

Basil was standing just inside the door, clutching its handle, his normally pin-neat hair disheveled and his spectacles askew. He looked surprised to see me and my companion at first, and then his expression hardened.

“Come in, quickly,” he said.

I thought he was being unnecessarily dramatic, but I hurried through the door all the same and brushed some dew droplets from my cloak as best I could.

“I didn’t know you were coming again,” he said.

“You said any night,” I reminded him. “And I need to talk to you.”

“Tonight is not just any night.” He blinked at Colin. “Who is this?”

“Another Snagged,” I said. “More than snagged. I don’t know how much of him is left, to be honest. His name is Colin. He has been Clarissa’s servant for a while—one of the sorceresses. I don’t know how long. I do know that she has been slowly using up his heart, and I saw her take all of what was left of it today, with my own eyes. He’s pretty far gone, but I thought ...” I gestured helplessly. “Even if you can’t help him, he will be among others like him. At the end.”

Basil stepped briskly up to Colin and unbuttoned his shirt. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and peered at the skin revealed beneath the cloth. Cornelius tried to peer out of my pocket, and I had to push him down.

I was surprised to see that Colin’s chest was nowhere near as badly diseased as Jol’s, despite his heart missing. There was a bruise and a few threads of green spiraling out from it, but nothing more.

“Yes,” confirmed Basil, correctly reading my expression, “he’s not too bad as yet—when it comes to the mold, at least. That means she didn’t take him too long ago, and she has been using him up pretty quickly. Some of the Magic-Workers like to keep a source close by, almost like a pet, in case they need heart magic in a hurry.”

He let his spectacles drop back to the end of his nose. “I’m not sure if we can do anything for him,” he said. “He might not be too badly infected as yet, but there’s very little of him left, I’m afraid. We can’t take him with us.” He pulled a piece of folded paper from the pouch at his waist. “I have our contact’s name and location here. Getting out of the kingdom will be quite the undertaking, and the journey beyond ... he would never survive.”

“The journey?” I said quickly. “To where?”

Basil tucked the paper back into his pouch.

“I’m sure you understand that I have to be very careful with that information,” he said. “It could get us into a lot of trouble if it fell into the wrong hands, and our salvation depends on it.”

“Of course,” I said, cursing inwardly. He really wasn’t going to give it to me, the sod, was he? He had it stuffed away in his stupid little pouch of papers, it seemed, and I couldn’t get my hands on it without wrestling him for it. I briefly considered actually doing that, but there were so many other Snagged about that I would probably be overpowered.

“I am glad you brought him to us, just the same,” said Basil. “You said his name was Colin? At least he can be among friends for his final days. I assume his Magic-Worker discarded him?”

No, I stole him from her while she was trying to rip out my heart, too, I thought, but I got the feeling Basil wouldn’t be too pleased that a riled-up sorceress might come storming in looking for her lost property, so I said, “Yes.”

“Well, thank you. We will take care of him,” he said. He took his spectacles off to clean them with a handkerchief he pulled from the little bag of papers. I felt my gaze drawn to it again. There had to be a way to get the name and address of whoever was repairing hearts out of there. “When are you going?” I asked.

“As I said—tonight is not just any night. We have sourced some good-quality hearts on the black market, and confirmed their authenticity,” he said. “A select few of us are leaving in the morning. We will be the first. Once we are healed, we will return for the others. They’ll be looking for more genuine hearts in the meantime.”

“I need to come with you,” I said.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Basil. “We chose by drawing lots.”

“I have a heart,” I said. I held the little thing out, and when he reached for it with greedy fingers, I closed my fist about it.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve run away, and the magic-workers might be looking for me. I need to come with you.”

“ Looking for you?” he hissed. “And you came here?”

I blinked. “Well, of course. Where else would I go?”

“You risk bringing them down upon us,” he scolded me. “This is our last night of preparation before we leave. Are they looking for this other one, too?”

“I suppose so,” I replied truthfully this time, taken aback.

“We can’t risk anything interfering with our plan,” he said. “You have to leave.”

“But ...” I began, but he was already walking away.

There was enough commotion with all the cleaning and clattering about the rest of the Snagged were doing that I felt able to talk to Cornelius without being overheard. I turned so that no one could see my mouth moving, and whispered to Cornelius. “He has the paper in the pouch at his waist. I have to see it.”

“I can get it,” hissed Cornelius.

“What? How?” I mouthed.

“Just let me out somewhere where he can’t see me.”

I sidled behind one of the old pub tables. Cornelius poured himself out of the pocket, slick and quick as ink, and disappeared into the cobwebby shadows.

I stood watching the others, trying not to look too awkward or expectant, my heart thudding in my chest. I saw Basil ordering a couple of them about as they packed bags, and then I saw a darting shadow under his feet. Basil cursed and tripped, and would have gone sprawling if it weren’t for the bar stool behind him that he was able to grab.

The other Snagged scrambled to get Basil to his feet and brush him off, and in the commotion, no one noticed a small cat neatly grabbing Basil’s leather pouch with its teeth and negotiating the forest of legs to carry it to me.

I snatched the fistful of papers from the pouch Cornelius dropped at my feet, turned my back, and shuffled through them as quickly as I could.

Basil seemed like the sort of fussy little man who would immediately notice anything amiss with his person, so I couldn’t risk taking too long.

Most were notes in Basil’s tiny, spidery hand, with footnotes and reference numbers, but one looked different—a map, drawn in green ink on thin parchment paper, like the kind used for wrapping meats, and a name: Weftwitch .

Underneath it were several copies of the same map, made in blue ink, and marked with Basil’s handwriting, so I didn’t feel too guilty about taking the original.

“Oh, these fell out of your pocket,” I turned around and said, stooping as if I were just then picking them up off the floor, and hoping that the crinkling of paper in my skirts didn’t give me away.

“Thank you,” Basil said, distracted, wiping his face with his handkerchief. He tucked the bundle away without looking at it. I felt a weight as Cornelius poured himself back into my pocket, quick and silent as a whisper.

Just then, the door disintegrated—not as if blown away by wind or fire, but as if the wood were rotting at a thousand times the usual speed, turning dark and damp as leaf mulch, and puddling on the threshold. It happened silently, as silently as decay, and a musty, forgotten smell like a long-closed room filled the tavern.

Perhaps that is why no one turned until the first sorceress entered, radiant as a second moon, and the room seemed to fill with light and fragrance. Following her came others—all the others.

It happened so quickly that all the Snagged seemed frozen for a moment—or perhaps they really were frozen, captivated despite themselves by the beauty of the women who strode in, bracelets jangling, and skirts and capes sweeping like great wings about their bodies. I was dazzled, truth be told, at that first glance.

It could have been a painting, “Avenging Angels,” or some such. They looked that regal and that fierce. And then movement returned, as the Snagged gathered themselves and started to run, pathetic as a scatter of cockroaches fleeing from a struck match.

Clarissa was the last to enter. She smiled upon us as if imparting a blessing and then raised her arms.

Em was the first to fall, gasping like a landed fish and clasping her withered, heavily ringed hands to her bosom.

Everyone was scrambling to get out of the dank little room that was now filling with the miasma of mold and decay, the stench of fear sweat, and the odd metallic tinge of magic, and no one stopped to help Em. It would have been useless, anyway.

The sorceress curled her fingers as if ready to pluck an apple from a tree, and what was left of the old heart streamed out, gay as ribbons from a maypole, toward those reaching fingers, red and black and sickly green altogether. It was almost pretty, if you didn’t know what it signified, and if that terrible, deathly stench hadn’t been filling the room.

One by one, the Snagged fell. The elderly lady crumpled without a sound. When Basil was struck, his glasses fell off, and his face looked naked without them. Nat made it a good distance, but not far enough.

He was young, so young. I remembered how he had spoken of a mother who had beaten and scolded him, and how the sorceress had seemed so perfect and loving by comparison. When he fell, he curled in on himself like a babe who had just fallen asleep.

The sorceresses snatched the paltry remains of the hearts from the Snagged who still had them: the last, rotting, vanishing morsels to which they had clung for so long in hopes of a cure. Shredded hearts flew every which way, like lengths of yarn spun on a wheel. It was the stuff of nightmares.

Cornelius leaped out of my pocket, no longer worried about concealment, and nipped at my leg, startling me into running. I grasped Colin by the hand, and the three of us darted up a back stair. Well, Cornelius and I darted, but Colin stumbled.

He would slow us down tremendously, but I felt a fierce protectiveness toward him, as a sort of symbol of what I could turn into if I wasn’t careful, and I was loath to leave him behind.

Clarissa saw me. I felt her sharp green gaze like a blade in my back. I turned my head to look at her, unwillingly, drawn by her stare and the pull of her beauty, and saw her raising one hand and pointing one painted, beringed finger directly at me, a finger that seemed all at once unnaturally long and over-jointed.

I expected my own heart to stream from my chest in a bright ribbon, and clearly so did she, and so we stared at each other for a moment of almost comic surprise when nothing happened. Then she screamed, doubling over and clutching at her stomach as if she had a sudden bout of terrible cramping.

I had no idea what could have caused it, but her moment of complete bafflement and then pain gave us a small sliver of time, and I pushed Colin ahead of me up the stairs before following.

Of course, running up the stairs then presented us with the problem of where to go next. This was no magic-worker’s dwelling, and “think sideways” wouldn’t be of any use here.

We could hide, or we could jump out a window and run. As far as I could tell, those were our only two options, and neither would be any use. They would find us if we hid, and even the slowest sorceress could easily outrun us. I hovered by the open window, deciding. When Colin grasped my arm, I jumped a foot in the air, thinking Clarissa had got hold of me.

“Leave me,” he said in a rasping voice. This was the first time I had heard him speak all day. I reached for him, but he drew back, taking his hand from my arm. It felt cold where he had gripped me.

“Don’t be an idiot!” I whisper-shouted. “She’ll kill you!”

“He is already dead,” said Cornelius from beside my feet. “He’s right. We have to go.”

We were already dead too, as far as I could tell. I had no idea why we weren’t already.

“I can’t leave him,” I said.

But I could hear and even feel Clarissa coming for us up the stairs, like the slow warming of a rising sun. I gave Colin one last, useless, despairing glance, and then left him there and jumped out the window, gracelessly, landing like a sack of potatoes and miraculously avoiding a twisted ankle. Cornelius, of course, landed as lightly as a flake of ash.

We ran out into the incongruously ordinary streets, damp and stinking from a light rain that had started falling while we were inside, and Cornelius and I sprinted away as fast as we could—or as fast as I could, because he slowed his pace to stay with me.

Something odd seemed to be happening, though. I was moving as fast as I could, but I seemed to be trotting more and more slowly, as if trying to run through thick soup, or honey. I swung my legs and arms as violently forward as I could, trying to push through whatever was restraining them, but I just seemed to be getting more tangled up.

“Why are you slowing down?” hissed Cornelius.

“I’m not!” I cried. “At least, I’m not trying to.”

The mist seemed danker and thicker than usual, and it covered my mouth and nose as if someone was holding a damp cloth over them. I was unpleasantly reminded of the cloth that the woman had soaked and wrung, soaked and wrung again over Jol’s clammy forehead. It had a similar stink to it.

“This is no natural mist,” I said to Cornelius. “Something is amiss.”

He flattened his ears tight against his skull. We stared together into the thickening air, which had grown so dense that we could no longer see the shapes of buildings through it. Sound was muffled. Those few passersby we had seen seemed to have vanished—whether spooked by the mist, or spirited away by it, I did not know.

Cornelius and I could have been alone in the vast city. It had become harder and harder to move through the mist, or whatever it was, and finally, I could no longer force my legs to move at all. I stopped dead. Cornelius’s eyes shone wide and unblinking.

Shapes formed in the mist. Long, tall shapes that I thought at first were thin figures, but then looked more like blades, gray against the darkness. Like pairs of blades. Like scissors, opening and shutting, cold and sharp.

“Cornelius,” I said under my breath, “any idea what these might be? Ghosts? Phantasms?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

There were dozens of them. Hundreds. I could see clearly now that they were in pairs, but even when I looked up and up, I could not see where the pairs joined. They snapped open and shut, clicking toward us, slicing up the mist. Were they machinery, or living creatures?

They were just close enough to human form to be unnerving, shifting in and out of shape so that one minute they appeared to be headless, the next limbless. They reminded me of the chains of paper dolls I used to cut out when I was a sprout, flimsy and wavering and misshapen.

“They look and smell pretty real to me,” said Cornelius.

“Smell?”

“If they were phantasms, they would have no scent. I’ve seen my share of ghosts. These are real, whatever they are.”

“And what do they smell of?” I knew I would not like the answer.

“Sulfur,” he said. “And bone.”

“Lovely. I was getting a whiff of the sulfurous smell myself now. They surrounded us, impossibly tall, impossibly sharp, slicing the mist itself into vertical ribbons that floated around us like ghostly prison bars.

“Run!” mewed Cornelius.

“I can’t,” I said, moving my mouth with difficulty, so that the words came out sounding slurred and drunk. I blinked, and my eyelids slid down as slowly as a sunset over my already-dry eyeballs. I was preserved in amber, swirling in a sticky oil like a heart in a jar. The world around me had become thick and viscous. “Cornelius ...”

I was going to tell him to run, if he still could. But before I could say anything, the terrible, life-sucking slowing down reached my belly and my chest. Breathing felt like inhaling molasses, my heart strained to beat, and when my eyelids finally closed, it was a relief.