19
When I opened my eyes again, the light had taken on the flat, iron gray of a cold morning, and I had a crick in my neck that made it feel like my head was on sideways. I sat there without moving for a while, feeling the rumble of the still-moving carriage and letting my eyes drift, not fixing themselves on any particular spot.
Well, almost. They did have a tendency to float over to Sylvester’s sleeping face when I let them, drawn by both the spell and his beauty. Sleep deepened the petals of shadow under his eyes, and even his eyelids themselves took on a violet tinge, making him look almost deathly. Still beautiful, but deathly. They twitched a little as I watched. I wondered what sorcerers dreamed of.
I pulled back the black curtain and looked out the window. The rot infecting the kingdom was even more evident now than when I had ridden out to the border town the first time. Everything looked yellow and sick.
Cornelius awoke with a start on my lap and bristled. He growled, a noise I hadn’t heard him make before, which made the skin on my forearms get goose pimples. I roused myself fully and sat up straight. Cornelius stood up as well, back arching.
“What’s going on?” I asked the cat.
“I don’t know, but it feels ... wrong.”
“What does?” I looked out of the window again and knew that I needed to wake the sorcerer. Outside, a mist had closed in on the horizon—or, at least, mist was the closest word I could use to describe it. It looked like the edges of the world had been erased into a greasy yellow white miasma. I would have doubted my eyes, except for Cornelius’s clear discomfort.
“I think we’re at the edge of the kingdom,” I said. I nudged Sylvester’s knee with mine, trying to ignore the jolt of desire that ran through me. He woke without any of the spluttering or bleary eyes that we normal mortals would have, instead becoming immediately alert and wary.
“What happened?” he asked.
I gestured to the window, and he peered out. The fact that even Sylvester looked concerned when he saw it worried me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Hmmm,” was all he responded.
“Very helpful. Is it magic? Has your father sent it to stop us?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I imagined getting lost in that terrifying, ravenous nothing . It reminded me a little of the spreading mold that had killed Jol, in a way, with its sense of sickness and corruption, except that the mold had been alive somewhat, while this mist seemed both impersonal and inert. Somehow, that made it more frightening.
I would rather have had a monster with claws and teeth blocking the road. I imagined that I could feel the mist nudging against the glass of the carriage windows, a numb ache pressing with terrible force. It wouldn’t eat you up or drain you of blood; it would muffle you into woolly nothingness.
“I will go and see what I can find out about it,” Sylvester said, stopping the carriage. “You stay here.”
“Fine.” I sat back in my seat and drew Cornelius into my arms. He would usually have protested, but he seemed disturbed enough that he succumbed to my petting, which was very concerning. The usual Cornelius would have given me a look of disgust at this indignity and retreated to the other side of the carriage.
Sylvester opened the carriage door, letting in a blast of cold air before slamming it shut again. I watched him through the black crystal window, and saw him pull up his high collar and bury his hands in his coat pockets as he strode toward the mist.
The cold had leeched the landscape of all color, and in the early morning light, everything was gray and white except for his stark, black figure.
“Wait,” I said suddenly, sitting up. “What’s that?”
I had heard something rumbling on the road behind us. The king’s men was my first thought, and I felt my body tense in readiness to run—not that I would get very far.
Then, as I peered out of the window, I realized it was simply another carriage, on the same road and presumably headed in the same direction. So, people did leave the kingdom from time to time, it seemed.
Sylvester continued on his path without turning, and so it was left to Cornelius and me to deal with this new arrival.
The carriage slowed as it neared us and drew abreast. There was no one else on the road, whether because of the earliness of the hour or some other, more sinister reason, and so there was no danger of it blocking the thoroughfare.
I opened the window, and the driver leaned to peer in the window at Cornelius and me, clearly nonplussed at seeing a very ordinary peasant girl and a fairly ordinary cat inside what was clearly a magic-worker’s carriage. I suppose he hadn’t spotted Sylvester, who was pacing back and forth a few hundred yards away.
“You all right?” the man asked, his brow furrowed. “Trouble with the carriage?”
One of the magical horses snorted through its dinner plate-sized nostrils, and the man started. He seemed jumpy.
“No, thanks,” I said. “Just stopping a while.”
“Right you are.” He squinted toward the horizon. “Weather looks a bit grim up ahead.”
That was an understatement. “Yes, it does,” I said. I couldn’t help but be curious, and so I went ahead and asked, “Where are you headed?”
“Me? Well, I’m off to ...” he started confidently and then trailed off.
“Off to ... ?” I prompted.
He frowned and scratched at his beard. “Right, as I said, I’m off to ... because ...”
I waited for a few beats. He reminded me of the few travelers I had met in the village, who always seemed so lost and uncertain about their destinations. This was starting to make a terrible sort of sense.
“You all right, then?” he said again. “Don’t need any help?”
Cornelius and I exchanged glances. “No, thanks,” I repeated. “We’re just stopping a while.”
“Right you are,” he said. “Well, I’m off home.”
He twitched the reins to turn the horse’s heads.
“Wait,” I stopped him. “You’re off home? Back that way?” I pointed behind us.
He looked mazed, like a man who has worked too long in the hot sun and can’t quite see straight. “Yes, off home,” he said. “I just came out this way to ...” He laughed a little. “Sorry, it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Thanks for stopping.”
“You take care now,” he said. He blinked at the ornate carriage, as if trying to focus on it, and then abruptly rattled his reins and steered his carriage round to face the other way. The whole conversation had reminded me of talking to a drunk outside the village tavern.
“He’s really leaving,” said Cornelius, putting his paws up on the windowsill.
“It’s like something made him forget where he was planning to go,” I said.
“It’s the magic,” said Cornelius. “I can smell it.”
Sylvester returned, letting in another breath of cold air as he settled himself back in the carriage. His coat smelled of ice and pine trees.
“I don’t think this mist has been sent for us,” said Sylvester, “although my father may yet send something to pursue us when he wakes up.”
That was the opposite of reassuring. “So, what is it, then?”
“Ghosts, of a sort,” he said, almost casually, as if he came across such things every day. Maybe he did. “They are very ancient. Almost fossilized. There are ways to tell the age of spells. You have heard how a tree’s age can be determined by cutting it open and counting the rings inside? It is something like that. One can take a slice of the spell, as it were—”
“Yes, yes, all right,” I interrupted. “You don’t need to tell me the whole mess of it.”
He pinked a little. I could see he had been a tad impressed with his own cleverness in analyzing the spell and was miffed to be hurried along. “I would be surprised if anyone but a magic-worker could sense them,” he continued. “There are so many, and they are so close together, that they create a barrier. But it spreads to either side, as far as I can measure. There is no way around it.”
“It’s like a moat, then?” I clarified. “Around the kingdom?”
“Something like that, but it has a sort of intelligence. There are souls trapped in there, of some sort. And it is of my father’s creation, as we suspected,” he said.
“And I can’t imagine it’s the sort of thing you can just wander through without something nasty happening,” I said.
“No.”
“Could you tell what particular nature of nasty thing would happen?”
“Not precisely,” he said. “There is a spell of forgetfulness bound in it, and one of hunger, and some other strands that I do not recognize. Knowing my father, whatever happens when you pass through the mist is bound to be exceedingly painful, if not altogether fatal.”
I told him about the man in the carriage who had seemed to become confused and disoriented. Sylvester listened, his lips pressed together.
“If my father wanted to keep his people within the kingdom, a spell of forgetfulness and confusion would serve to hold them from the mist without causing unnecessary fear or concern,” he mused. “And then, if they somehow managed to break free of the confusion, the mist itself would stop them from leaving.”
“So, no one can leave,” I said, half to myself.
Sylvester suddenly gasped and doubled over as if someone had punched him in the gut.
“What? What is it?” I cried.
“My father is awake,” he gasped, still bent in half, his dark hair hanging down and shrouding his face so I could not see his expression.
“How long will it take him to find us?” I said, urgently.
Sylvester looked up, shaking back his hair. Even as my mind worked frantically, trying to think of a way out, I couldn’t help admiring how his hair settled back into perfect waves around his face without him even having to smooth it down.
“Not long enough,” he said. “We have to leave. Now.”
He crumpled again. Instinctively, I reached out to help him, then curled my fingers into fists instead.
“What is he doing to you?”
“He is not at full strength yet,” panted Sylvester, breath ragged. “But he is trying to reach out to me.”
“And can he?”
“Easily, once he is back to himself. He might even be able to kill me at this distance, if he was willing to use up enough of the good hearts he has left. And he may just be angry enough to do that.”
I turned to look at the terrible, churning mist.
“All right, so we have to get through now. But how are we going to get through that? Use a heart?”
My desperation was such that even I, who was so opposed to using them at all, was becoming accustomed to the idea of burning the hearts up in order to get where, and do what, we needed to. I could see how someone like Sylvester could swiftly stop thinking of them as parts of a person at all and instead see them merely as fuel. Kindling for the fire.
He shook his head. “I cannot see a way.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean, you can’t see a way?”
“Just what I said. I don’t know how to pass through the barrier without harm, even with heart magic.” He spread his fingers wide in a show of helplessness. “There is no spell of mine that could bring us safely through.”
“ No spell?”
“My father’s magic is too powerful.”
“How many hearts do we have left? Use all of them!”
“Not enough,” he said.
“What are we supposed to do, then?” I almost shouted. “We can’t go back!”
“I don’t know.”
“So that’s it, then? We’re trapped here until your father finds us?”
It was infuriating. On the other side of that barrier sat a whole other world, a world that apparently contained the magic to heal my heart and save my Da, and we could not access it.
The mist might look insubstantial, but it might as well have been a wall a hundred miles high. If we didn’t manage to find a way through it, I thought, we were lost. All the hearts were lost, not just mine. And I would become another one of the king’s experiments.
Wait. The king’s experiments. I remembered how he had toyed with the jar holding my heart. How Clarissa had told me that I had a special resistance to magic.
“Use my heart,” I said.
“What?”
Even Cornelius was looking at me as if I was crazy.
“Use my heart to cast your spells.” I brought out the jar from my pocket and tried not to look at the piece of myself that was sloshing around inside.
“Even if I were to ... use it,” said Sylvester, “it would not be enough. I don’t know how many hearts could bring down a spell as strong and old and weighty as this one, but it’s probably more than we could gather in a year.”
“It will work,” I insisted. I felt certain, oddly certain, that this was the right thing to do.
“Foss,” argued Sylvester gently. “Even if it did work, we are traveling to find someone who can make your heart whole again. You need both parts.”
“That’s not the only reason we’re doing this,” I said. “I am not the only one who is broken and needs mending. There are many. And if your father and sisters do not stop harvesting, there will be many more. I don’t know what we will learn outside of the kingdom, but there must be some knowledge out there that we don’t have, that will help us. That we can bring back.”
“You don’t know for sure that we will find out anything of use, or if this heart mender even exists.” He seemed to be pleading with me, oddly.
“We have to try,” I urged him. “It will work. I know it.”
Sylvester stared at me and then at the jar.
“I know it,” I repeated. “And besides,” I tried to sound cheerful, “I’ve survived without it this long.”
“You will never again be whole,” he said.
“We don’t know that. Maybe this Weftwitch will be able to help in some way, once we get there.”
He sighed. “Fine. But I do this under protest.”
“So long as you do it.”
I held out the jar, and he took it. There was not the same sense of violation, of wrongness, as when the king had held it. It actually felt almost comforting, seeing my heart beat in his hands. Perhaps that was all part of the spell. He left the carriage and walked toward the mist again, holding my heart this time.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Cornelius.
“I think so,” I said.
Cornelius curled up on my lap when I arranged the furs about me again, as if to give me some measure of comfort.
I do not understand the exact mechanics of what Sylvester did when casting a spell. I wondered if he would even be able to explain them in a way I could understand, if I asked, or if it would be like trying to explain air to a fish.
From the outside, it had never looked like much. I had seen him perform minor magicks now and then with little ceremony, to create his toys and little fires. And even the larger tricks I had witnessed—opening the palace door—had been accomplished with little more than a gesture.
If his father’s boundary spell was as wide and strong and deep as he had described, however, it would require something of the strength needed to uproot an ancient tree whose roots had become as complex as a city full of streets and alleyways.
Cornelius and I both pressed our noses to the crystal window and watched Sylvester’s tall, black figure stride to the very edge of the mist and stand there, arms upraised as if he meant to embrace it.
By a trick of the shifting fog and gray morning light, he looked like a raven gliding over snow. The shapes in the mist seemed to bend and sway in response to the sorcerer’s movements.
Sylvester held the jar containing my heart in one hand. I could see the little silver chain dangling from it like a strand of cobweb. His face was turned from us, so we could not see if he spoke, or even changed expression, but the mist flashed white for a moment and seemed to shiver.
“He’s doing something,” said Cornelius. “Do you feel it?”
“No. I don’t feel anything.”
I spoke too soon, however. A great pain gripped my chest, and I gasped and fell back. Cornelius jumped out of the way. It was just like the old pain of being apart from the sorcerer, and it only grew in intensity. I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake—if, by urging Sylvester to use my heart, I had signed my own death warrant.
“The mist is fading,” said Cornelius from the window. He had both paws pressed against the crystal. “Are you all right?”
I couldn’t even answer him. Sweat pearled on my forehead. I managed to heave myself to the window and press my face against it, gasping circles of warm breath onto the crystal. I saw Sylvester lowering his arms, and I saw that the jar that had once contained my half heart now contained golden oil and nothing more.
“It’s done,” I managed to say. My breath was slowly coming back.
“Look,” said Cornelius. The mist was dissipating—not all of it, but enough of it to leave a tunnel wide enough for our carriage to pass through. Sylvester was hurrying back to us, the jar swinging from his hand. He wrenched open the door.
“Foss? Are you all right?” he demanded.
“Yes,” I said. The pain was fading. “It ... stung for a moment. That’s all.”
“You were right,” he said. “It worked. But we have to hurry. I don’t know how long it will hold.”
The magical horses snorted to life again and went from a standstill to a gallop with a flick of Sylvester’s wrist. I felt warmth returning to my hands and face, and only then realized how freezing cold I had been while he was performing the spell.
Sylvester watched me from the opposite seat, his eyes intent. He still held the jar between his hands. My heart was gone, and in its place were swirling dark specks that looked like drifting ash.
The horses sped through the pathway we had created, and the mist arched over us and at either side, swirling malevolently at its edges, as if it would surge in and dissolve us if it could. Cornelius had hunkered down again, his front paws tucked underneath him, and had started an anxious purr.
“How thick do you think it is?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Sylvester helpfully.
The mist boiled and hissed at its edges. I shut my eyes, but I still felt it, an awful presence hemming us in from every side.
“What does it feel like?” Sylvester asked. “The heartsickness.”
“What?”
“You experienced some of it just now, didn’t you? When I used your heart?”
I opened my eyes. His skin looked even paler than usual against the dark fur trim of his coat. He had drawn it up tight against his long throat, against the cold. If I had let myself, I would have reached forward to stroke the spoonful of white skin that showed. It took all my strength to restrain myself, and even then, my hands wavered in my lap as if ready to obey. I felt the hot dousing of shame once more.
“It is hell,” I said, more forcefully than I had intended to. One of his perfectly shaped eyebrows rose a little. “It is like being thirsty, all the time, and never allowed to drink. It is like bleeding inside and dying a little at a time. It is like a fever that never breaks.”
His eyes were very steady, but their blue had darkened. I glared at his stupid, unfeeling, perfect, beloved face and wanted to slap it.
“Worst of all, it is embarrassing ,” I said.
“The worst part is the embarrassment. Not the unbearable pain?”
“Yes,” I said. “Because yes, I’m a good cook, a competent butcher, and a more than competent accountant, and I did manage to leave my village and follow you to the city, which is more than almost anyone I know has ever done ...”
“... And you murdered a sorceress,” Cornelius added.
“Yes, thank you—but despite all of that, to look the way I do and to love someone who looks the way you do, that is a humiliation that is worse than any pain. I would gladly take the suffering and leave the love, if I could. I would be in pain every day rather than love you.”
“To look the way you do?” He stared at me in puzzlement.
I flushed. I had given too much away.
“But I was just admiring you,” he said. “You have ...”
“I can see the sunlight!” exclaimed Cornelius, who was observant but had no sense of timing. He was right—we passed through the last of the mist, and the world opened up again, bright and full of possibilities.