23
When the final rumbles from the two Houses’ destruction had ceased, and the dust had settled, we finally had the time and leisure to look about us.
We were in the city—but I couldn’t believe it was the same city. Perhaps we had somehow slipped through the complicated bonds between the House and the Other House into one of the distortions of space and time that Sylvester liked to talk about.
Not only was menace so strong in the air that you could almost smell it, but the streets were deserted, and all the windows and doors I could see were either shuttered tight or boarded up. The barricades showed signs of haste—the boards were mismatched, as if torn from different pieces of furniture or floorboards, and the nails that I could see were haphazardly set. The whole place felt as uninhabited as the ghost town that we had stumbled into across the border.
“What happened here?” I wondered, turning slowly around. This quiet was unnatural. More than that, there was tension thrumming in the air that even my nonmagical self could feel.
“I’m feeling a bit dizzy,” said Cornelius. I gathered him into my arms, where he felt smaller than usual. I ran my hand over his fur, feeling for any injury.
“I don’t think I’m hurt,” he said. “I just feel odd.”
“I’m not surprised, after nearly being swallowed back there,” I said, and kept him cradled in my arms as we walked.
“There are people here. I can feel them,” Sylvester said. “They are inside. They are afraid.”
His voice echoed oddly off the buildings—the silence was that thick, with not even the scurry and squeak of a rat to break it.
I made a decision. I went to the nearest door and pounded on it, loud enough to wake the dead.
“What are you doing?” said Sylvester.
I banged my fists even harder. “Open up!” I yelled “I’m not going to stop!”
Finally, the door opened a sliver. I saw two frightened eyes and a slice of a nose.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded. “Where is everyone?”
“The king ...” said the eyes and nose in a wavering voice. They looked beyond me and saw Sylvester. The eyes widened in horror and panic, and the person would have slammed the door if I hadn’t seen that coming and jammed my foot in the way, between some of the hastily nailed boards. “I thought they were all gone!” they gasped.
“The magic-workers? Where did they go?” I demanded.
“They rode out. All of them. The king, and the ladies ... so splendid. Like a parade. Everyone came out and cheered.” It was an old woman, I realized, and one who was clearly very frightened. “We’d never seen anything like it. The king told us there was an army on the border, that they were going to stop the army. He told us not to be afraid, but to stay inside and bar the doors until he returned.”
Clever. We all grew up knowing that the king and his sorceresses protected us from war and invasion. If rumors of their vast harvest this time made it to the city and more central villages, the king could claim the people had merely been casualties of this supposed war.
And by couching the harvest as a parade to certain victory, they would have the kingdom’s people lining the streets throwing flowers and waving flags, cheering on their own destruction.
The old woman’s eyes kept drifting to Sylvester, and I saw the familiar look of awe and longing on her wrinkled face. Even now, as she huddled terrified in her house, she was caught up by his beauty and glamor, a rabbit mesmerized by a snake. The fact that I loved the snake didn’t make me any less sympathetic to the rabbit.
“How long have they been gone?” I asked. I had to ask her twice, because she was so busy staring at Sylvester.
“Since yesterday,” she said. “We haven’t heard a thing. Do you know anything?”
This last was directed at Sylvester.
“Uh ...” He was at a loss for words. “No. But ... Stay inside. Keep waiting for news.”
“And keep your door locked,” I said to her—uselessly, because, of course, the king and sorceresses were already gone, and even if they weren’t, a wooden door wouldn’t present much of an obstacle.
I had to say something, though, to assuage the terrible rage and helplessness I felt. She didn’t need telling twice, but shot back into her burrow quick as winking, with only one more quick glance at the sorcerer.
“They moved swiftly,” said Sylvester.
“We knew they would,” I said. “And now we have to catch up. Who knows how many hearts they’ve harvested already?”
“And our visit to the Weftwitch armed us with nothing more than knowledge.”
My conscience prickled as I thought of the seal. “We have to go to the palace,” I said quickly, smothering my guilt. “We need some kind of weapon against the king. Your magic against him and all your sisters ... Even if you were the most powerful sorcerer in the world, we would have no chance.”
Sylvester nodded. “There may yet be usable hearts. Unless my father took them all with him.”
“Let’s hope he didn’t,” I said grimly. Cornelius was half asleep in my arms. I stroked his head. “Maybe you should stay here,” I told him. “Find a safe spot and wait for us.”
“Nonsense,” he squeaked. “I’m coming with you.”
“I can get us up to the palace,” said Sylvester. “Just. But we will need to use the carriage for the rest of the journey. It will take several hours to catch up to my father.”
“Then we need to go now,” I said.
There was a queasy lurch in my stomach as Sylvester rearranged reality around us, but after the nightmare we’d just been through with the House, it felt like a pleasant evening stroll.
Like the rest of the city, the palace was abandoned. I suppose a skeleton staff probably continued working inside, as a place like that needed a lot of daily maintenance.
“No guards at the gate,” I remarked. “That’s lucky.”
Sylvester shook his head. “It means the king has set wards that negate the need for guards.” He stood with a wide stance, the same look of concentration on his face that he had when he faced down the mist. “I can feel them. Like a net cast over the place.”
“Can you get through?”
“I think so.” He turned to look at me, his hair sparkling with the first evening dew. He held out his hand. “With help.”
“What?” I almost dropped Cornelius, who mewed in protest.
“This bond between us,” he said. “I have been thinking on it for a long time. When my mistake met your heart, it formed a connection that I still don’t fully understand, but which seems to work on my magic in a similar way that the House did—only better.”
“What?”
“You must have noticed how your touch has helped me when I am casting. When you managed to calm the chaos I caused in the House with the spell book. When you helped me open the door to the chamber where Millie was imprisoned. You diffuse the wild magic that could spill out and cause damage, but you also help me focus what remains.”
I just gaped at him.
“With the House gone, there is no way to siphon off any excess magic I might produce,” he continued. “From here on, all of it will pour into any spell I cast. That could be disastrous, especially when I am using the hearts.”
“Right, we don’t want to blow the place up,” I conceded, remembering all the times he had nearly burned down the House. “Fine.” I took his hand. “But I don’t think ...”
As soon as I touched his skin, an iridescent membrane shimmered into being before the doors of the palace.
“There it is,” said Sylvester softly. He exhaled, and the membrane popped like a bubble. I imagined I heard a similar, smaller pop from inside his cloak as another of our store of hearts winked out of existence. I hated that we had to use them, but what choice did we have?
Even though the wards were gone, we walked into the palace with caution. Cornelius protested that he was well able to walk on his own four paws, thank you very much, but I continued to carry him.
Besides my concern about his well-being, his warm weight was comforting. The place still gave me the creeps.
Sylvester knew the way to the storage room, which I was grateful for, since I hadn’t been in my best frame of mind the last time I was here.
The corruption had clearly spread rapidly since we left. Almost every jar contained a heart speckled with green and black, furred with mold.
We walked quietly between the rows, with no sound but the faint clink and slosh as we lifted down those which seemed least affected. I tried not to look at the board to which I had been strapped, nor at the telltale stain on the floor where the jars had smashed.
Finally, we had gathered as many of the relatively good hearts that we could find, and Sylvester stashed them in his seemingly infinitely capacious pockets until even they ran out of room.
“Right, let’s go,” he said, when we had finished.
“Stop,” I said. “There’s one more thing.”
He read it in my face. “Foss ... It’s too late. And if we interrupt the transformation before it is complete ... I don’t know if she would even survive. We can come back later, when all this is over, and I can study her then, mayhap find a way to ...”
“There will probably be no later,” I argued.
“Foss ...”
“No, I’m being realistic. Of course we’re going to try, but what chance do we stand, really? And if the king gets rid of us both, he’ll just come back here and continue on his merry way. Millie will spend another few years floating in that godsforsaken tank, and then pop out as half a monster, just as you did.”
“Thank you,” he said, with heavy sarcasm.
“You know what I mean. Maybe she’ll be more like you, but more likely not. And honestly, she might be better off dead than turning into that.”
He huffed out a frustrated breath.
“Sylvester. Please.” I touched his arm, lightly. He looked down at my hand where it rested on the velvet of his sleeve and sighed. “Fine. Let us go, then.”
It seemed the king hadn’t been too concerned that anyone would come for Millie, as the locks on the chamber with the transformation tank weren’t even fastened. I suppose that, to him, it would be impossible to imagine that anyone would want this unwanted child, especially in her in-between state.
I knew what I was walking into this time, and it was still a shock. She hovered in that honey gold liquid, pinned and preserved like a specimen. Her heart, now fully blackened, still floated just a little away from the rest of her.
“How do we get her out without hurting her?” I asked.
Sylvester placed his hands against the glass, or crystal, or whatever the tank was made of.
“I’m not sure exactly how it works,” he admitted. “I do know that the heart is taken out of us and replaced with something else, and that our original hearts wither and die. But I don’t know if she can survive without it attached to her yet.”
The thread connecting her to her heart was something like an umbilical cord then, passing something from the organ to her. Something she must still need.
“I think I can get her out,” Sylvester finally said, still touching the glass with questing fingers, like a blind man reading a face. I knew he was examining the spell as best he could, trying to see it like one of the fiery cats’ cradles with which he liked to play. “But I can’t do anything about her heart. The new one inside her may have grown enough to sustain her ...”
“Or it might not have,” I finished. I chewed on my lip.
“It’s up to you.” He turned to look at me, his eyes bright silver in the eerie light emanating from the tank.
“Do it,” I decided.
Sylvester nodded. He reached out a hand for me again. I hesitated.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “This seems like a delicate process.”
“All the more reason.”
I gently placed Cornelius on the ground and touched Sylvester’s hand, lightly at first, then laced his fingers with mine. He waited for me to nod and then pressed his other hand against the glass of the tank. I really hoped it wouldn’t explode. Cornelius crouched beneath the shelter of my skirt, just in case.
The tank shattered. The liquid inside flooded out, so much more of it than I had expected, and it was sticky and warm around my ankles. Cornelius leaped up onto my shoulder and shook himself.
The threads holding Millie up snapped, one by one, and she slithered out of the tank and onto the floor. The rush of the liquid had been enough to carry her over the worst of the shattered glass, so she only had a few scratches that I could see. The black heart, dragged behind her, looked deflated and soggy. I fought down the urge to vomit.
Sylvester let go of my hand and knelt next to Millie’s body. He took the cord attaching her to her heart and pulled it apart between his hands. It stretched out for a second, long and sinewy, and then snapped with a sound that nearly turned my stomach again. We both stared down at her.
For a moment, I could see nothing—and then I saw the faint pulse at her throat, and the surge of her chest. I let out a long breath of relief.
“We’ll have to bring her with us,” said Sylvester. With a flicker of his fingers, he bundled her up in warm, black clothing, making her skin look even more bloodless against it.
“I can carry her. You worry about the hearts.”
I hefted Millie up so that her lolling head rested on my shoulder and my arms were curved around her back and under her knees.
The liquid from the tank had left her skin slick and a little tacky to the touch, and my hands struggled to find purchase, but eventually I had her more or less secure. She was a substantial weight despite her diminutive size. Only the almost imperceptible shiver of her eyelashes and the occasional puff of breath against my shoulder reassured me that she was still alive.
Quick as winking, Sylvester magicked us outside again, near where the House had been. The fact that we had so many more hearts to use now, despite the corruption slowly dissolving them, made me feel a lot better about facing the king. We would not be entirely helpless—and perhaps I wouldn’t have to use the Weftwitch’s seal after all.
“We’ll need the carriage,” I said.
“Foss ...” Sylvester began, but then out of nowhere came the sour, old-penny smell of copper, twanging and blue-tinged in the air—don’t ask me how a smell smelled blue and smelled like a twanging sound, but it did—and the air around us seemed to knot up tight and tense like a horse’s haunches before a leap.
I gasped and collapsed against the brick of the old woman’s house, barely holding onto Millie. The sorcerer was just as unprepared as I was, and he crumpled with a faint, “oh,” as if he were mildly surprised, falling to the cobblestones.
“Sylvester!” I let Millie down, then knelt beside the sorcerer and cupped his face in my hands. “What happened? What’s wrong?” Cornelius mewed from my shoulder.
“My father ...”
The sorcerer’s breathing was shallow, his lips already bluish. I tore open his shirt, feeling the shock of the spell when my skin touched his, but pushing it aside so that I could feel across his torso and find his heart. His pulse was faint and thready. The veins on his chest stood out dark and angry, and all his muscles were tensed.
“It’s a spell,” he managed. “Weaker because cast from far away, but still potent. I had my protections in place, but they must have slipped for a moment ...”
“Your father did this?”
“He must have been waiting ... for us to get back.”
“Is he going to try again?”
“I’ve put the protection spells back up, but ...”
His eyes were milky, streaked with dark veins.
“Sylvester. Sylvester. But what? What do I do?”
His eyes flickered. I wanted to shake him and embrace him all at once. “ Sylvester !” I hissed again.
“They will hold,” he said, as if every word was a great effort.
“What can I do? How can I help you?”
“Pocket,” he said.
“What?”
“The carriage ... in my pocket.”
“Are you delirious?”
He shook his head violently from side to side, eyes closed. “ Pocket ,” he repeated.
I rummaged through the pockets of his cloak. There seemed to be an infinite amount of them, and my fingers brushed against textures I didn’t recognize or want to investigate too closely. At one point, I could have sworn that my hand disappeared into one pocket and poked out of another.
It was a wildly disorganized manner of storing one’s magical items, and I made a mental note to talk to Sylvester about this later, when he wasn’t about to die. Finally, I felt something that thrummed with the texture of “carriage” under my fingertips. I grasped it and pulled it out, keeping it concealed in my fist.
It was an uncomfortable sort of thing to hold, smooth but somehow complicated, and felt impatient in my hand. Somewhere inside it, the horses were stamping on the ground, ready to run.
I shook Sylvester until his eyes opened. “What do I do?” I hissed.
“Throw it,” he managed to say.
I threw it onto the cobbles, where it exploded. From a tablet the size of a snuffbox, it burst open and became, once again, a full, heavily ornamented carriage and two horses with steaming nostrils and restless, stamping hooves.
“We have to go,” said Sylvester, struggling to hold himself up on one elbow.
“You’re no match for your father in this state!”
“I’m no match for him in any state,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “But we have to try.”
Cornelius hopped up into the carriage, and I hauled Sylvester up to follow. He was heavy, but I could just about manage it. I bumped him up the carriage steps in an undignified manner, arranging him on one of the seats before checking his pulse. It was steady, but soft.
“Leave it,” said Sylvester. “I’m fine.”
“Of course you’re not,” I said. The success of our mission seemed more and more unlikely with every passing moment. I went back for Millie and did the same with her, arranging her against the opposite door so that her head was propped up, and spreading one of the heavy furs over her. “How are you holding up?” I asked Sylvester.
“I’m fighting it,” he said, panting a little. “But we have to go.”
“Go where? We don’t know where they are yet! They could be anywhere in the kingdom.”
“No,” he said, his breath still coming raggedly. “One good thing ... about the spell. It’s like an arrow shot at me ... from far away ... with a rope trailing behind. I can follow it back ... see where it came from.”
“You can tell where he is?”
“By holding on to his spell, yes. I can trace it back.” He closed his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Foss.”
“Why are you ...” But then I realized.
Da.