A Harvest of Hearts

20. 2

Even I, the most unmagical person you could ever hope to find—practically the opposite of a magical person in fact— could feel the difference at once. The world became denser and thicker, and even a little dimmer, as if seen through a widow’s veil.

Sylvester, apparently, felt the difference like a bag of rocks dropped on his head, judging by the way he reacted. He bent over double, his tall frame crumpling in the middle, and started gasping, hands pressed to his heart.

It looked a little like my heartsickness felt, I observed with quasi-scientific interest, and not a little malicious satisfaction.

“Help me,” he gasped.

I had to admit, I was taking a little pleasure in his suffering after all he had inflicted on me, intentionally or not, but I went over to him anyway. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I rested one hand on his shoulder in a show of sympathy. He leaned into me heavily, setting me off balance, and I ended up supporting his weight.

I braced for the flood of love and desire to rush through me, as it usually would, but nothing happened. I backed away from him, shocked, and he nearly fell over.

“What was that for?” he shouted, sounding almost like a normal person.

“Nothing,” I whispered. “There’s nothing.”

“What?”

“I don’t feel it,” I said, more loudly. I stood up straight, letting my spine uncurl and my throat loosen to let in a long, clean ribbon of breath. I had not realized how tensely I had been holding myself. For weeks.

That terrible, wonderful, all-consuming love and obsession was gone, like a fever finally breaking. And, as in the aftermath of a fever, I felt light and cleansed and free, shivering a little as my skin accustomed itself again to covering just ordinary old Foss, and not a boiling, infesting passion that could barely be contained. The air, even in this strange, heavy place, tasted light.

Sylvester, on the other hand, looked terrible. His eyes had violet petals of fatigue beneath them, and the carved perfection of his cheekbones now looked somehow hollow. “You don’t feel that?” he managed to say.

“The spell,” I said. “The spell has gone. It can’t survive here.”

And, more—now that the overwhelming love and devotion of the spell was missing, I could truly feel the absence of half my heart. It was hollow and yearning, like an empty belly, but deeper, more profound: perhaps like the emptiness a mother feels after her babe has left her womb.

I had never felt it, not truly, and now there was no chance of reuniting my heart with itself, because we had turned it to ash and powder in coming here, and it was gone forever.

A terrible, yawning grief filled me, a grief so wide and high that it blotted out the sky, and I clutched at a tree trunk to steady myself.

“Foss,” came Sylvester’s voice from far away. “What is wrong?”

I felt as one bereaved. It was as if Da had died, or if I had lost my mother all over again. I pressed my forehead against the bark of the trunk and waited for the swimming, breathless sensation to pass. What a change from the effervescence of a few moments before!

“I’m fine,” I managed to say.

“You do not look fine.”

“Neither do you.” I stared at him. “And neither do your clothes .”

Sylvester struggled upright. The dark edges of his clothing had become smoky and indistinct, crawling about as if alive and looking for an escape. The buttons on his coat seemed to have grown legs and scuttled about like bugs. The effect was unsettling, I can tell you. His clothes were unknitting themselves before my eyes.

“They’re made of magic,” he said. “They’re coming undone.”

I realized then that my magic-made cloak had disappeared, but luckily, I was wearing my own dress underneath, the one I had taken from Da’s.

I felt at the pocket, and my few things were somehow there. I suppose the cloak had only been an illusion, after all, while those objects were real and so hadn’t vanished.

Had they really been in the cloak pocket then, all along, or had they really been in my dress pocket, and the magic had made me think otherwise? It all made my head ache, as magic business tended to.

“I didn’t think of it.” I suddenly realized how lucky we had apparently been. “Your father made you using magic. This place could have ... unmade you.”

“There must be enough of a real person left in me, then,” said Sylvester drily.

“Right, but your garments are having some trouble.”

One of the bug buttons pinged itself off his coat and was swallowed into nothingness. His boots appeared to have turned into some kind of black oily substance and were trying to climb up his legs. Sylvester himself looked gray-faced and exhausted.

“Perhaps you should get undressed,” I suggested.

He looked at me sharply.

“I’m not under the spell right now, remember?” I said. “I have no desire for you to be naked for nakedness’s sake. Your clothes just look like they’re about to eat you. Or strangle you. They’re hanging on by a thread in this place. Literally.”

He looked down at his frantically unravelling clothing and sighed. “Fine.”

He divested himself of his belt and the jars containing the hearts he had taken from the storeroom (which seemed to be surviving the new environment just fine, as I suppose they were not inherently magical in themselves without a magic-worker’s hand to wield them), as well as some other mysterious substances, and then busied himself with trying to get free of his suddenly uncooperative garments. Some of them had become smoke, some liquid, and some appeared to have winking eyes and too many legs.

As he peeled off each item of clothing, it was snatched away from him as if by a high wind and dissipated in the air without a trace. Soon he was clad only in what had once been undergarments, but were now more like some sleek, predatory little animal coiling itself around his hips—a weasel maybe, or a pine marten.

“Can you turn around so I can get these off?” he asked.

“And stay turned around for the rest of the day, walking backward?” I said. “I’m going to have to look at you at some point.”

“At least while I undress,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, and turned around, my heart beating a little faster. So, I wasn’t caught up in the spell anymore, but I was still a woman. And despite his current sickly appearance, Sylvester was still the best-looking man I would probably ever have the pleasure of looking upon.

I heard rustling and the snapping of tiny teeth, and then silence. Either he had freed himself from his undergarments-turned-attackers, or they had eaten him.

“Can I turn around?” I asked.

A pause. Then, “I suppose so,” he said irritably.

An idea occurred to me. “Here.” I hitched up my skirt and untied my petticoat, wriggling out of it and letting it fall to the ground. I held it out behind me without turning. “Fashion yourself something out of this.”

My heart was beating fast, but it could not be the spell. The spell was gone. I felt the fabric slip from my fingers, and I let my arm fall back to my side. When the sounds of rustling stopped from behind me, I said, “Ready?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

I turned and couldn’t help snorting out a laugh before I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Sorry,” I giggled.

He had made himself a sort of garment out of the petticoat, wrapping it around his torso and between his legs, but it barely reached the middle of his thighs. The rest of his legs were bare, as well as his feet, and his shoulders and arms poked out above the swathe of fabric. It looked rather like a diaper you would pin on a baby.

His head, perched on top of the whole concoction, looked both embarrassed and disgruntled, and he was altogether about as comfortable as a wet cat.

“What was I supposed to do?” he huffed. “There’s no way not to look ridiculous.”

“I like you looking ridiculous,” I said. “Just don’t bruise your pretty white feet on these pebbles.”

We picked our way down the stony path. Sylvester was green-faced and struggling in the magic-less air, and, for a change, it was I who seemed the stronger of the two of us.

I was enjoying the new lightness of my body and spirit without the weight of the spell, and so I was practically skipping along. I slowed my pace to match his, though, and he leaned on my shoulder when he needed to.

It was odd, touching him without that overwhelming mess of emotions. I didn’t feel nothing . I felt a warmth and some fluttering in my belly, but they were normal feelings that I would expect to have, being so close to someone who looked like him.

He let out a long breath of air—not quite a sigh, but not quite a normal breath either.

“What’s wrong?”

“You will laugh,” he said, “after what happened to my clothes.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Well, I might. But tell me anyway.”

“I was wondering, maybe hoping, even,” he said, “that this place would leech all the magic out of me and perhaps ... return me to my original state.”

I stared at him, but he kept his face turned resolutely ahead.

“Back to being ... human? Fully human?”

“Yes. As I said, it was just a curiosity.”

“A hope.”

“Perhaps.”

“Maybe you—the original you—and the magic are too entwined now,” I mused. “Like the House and the old building beneath it.”

“That seems likely,” he said. “I hoped it were not so. That there was enough left of ... the boy ... to stand when the rest of me fell.”

“Well,” I said, “I can certainly understand that feeling, but I have to say that I would miss the whole Sylvester, even if the part of him that fell away was the magic part.”

I realized to my surprise that this was true—that it had to be true, because I was temporarily released from the spell and therefore speaking truly, from my real self, and not from the ensorcelled version.

I would miss him if he were gone or changed irreparably. I liked him. That was a revelation and a half, I’ll tell you.

“Thank you,” he said, sounding as startled as I was and about as embarrassed as I was, too. I kept my face set and downward-facing and trudged on ahead of him, stolid old Foss, without turning to look at him again.

I had expected a witch’s cottage, something all points and corners, with birds nesting in the nooks and spiders spinning in the crannies, and possibly even a pair of chicken legs growing out from underneath, but the house at the end of the path was instead a solid, housewifely sort of house. It had a well-swept yard that concealed no eldritch tangles of herbs, but instead a well-ordered vegetable garden and a couple of very attractive, if a little old-fashioned, flower beds.

“Is this it?” asked Sylvester.

“It must be,” I said. “There’s no one else around for miles.”

“I could be better attired,” he grumbled, picking at the threads of my petticoat he wore wrapped around him.

“From the sounds of it, this lady is none too keen on the magic-workers. I doubt she’d like you any better if you were in your fancy clobber.”

“I could at least be wearing trousers .”

I had to stifle a chuckle. I enjoyed seeing him at a disadvantage.

“Better let me ring the doorbell, then,” I said. “Just in case she takes one look at you and gets the broom to shoo you away.”

“Very funny,” he said.

We did walk up the path with a fair bit of trepidation, though, not sure what to expect. Would she turn us away at once, before hearing us out? As far as I knew, she was my one and only hope to getting my heart back hale and (pardon the pun) hearty.

If this failed, what then? Sylvester, Cornelius and I would either have to creep back to our kingdom and brave the king’s wrath, or live out our lives in exile.

The closer we got, the more impressed I was with the cottage. It appeared freshly painted, and the front step, although bowed in the middle and worn shiny with years of use, was spotless. The door was painted red, with a large iron knocker near the top. Someone took great care of the place.

“Ready?” I said to Sylvester, letting my hand hover over the knocker.

He nodded.

I knocked, and I heard its hollow clock-clock sound echo through the cottage. Something squawked, a bird of some kind, and then I heard footsteps, and a voice that was probably telling the squawking thing to be quiet.

The door opened, and an attractive, round-cheeked, middle-aged woman stood wiping her hands on a red apron and looking at us with a brightly inquiring look. I had never seen anyone less witchlike.

“Yes?” she said.

I was taken a little aback, I have to say. It was clear that very few people came out here, but the woman was looking at us with her head cocked a little to one side and a polite smile on her face, as if she was used to fending off door-to-door salespeople and traveling preachers every morning when she was in the midst of her baking.

Add to that, Sylvester and I weren’t the most usual-looking people. Especially if you took into account his odd manner of dress.

She was still waiting for a reply, and so I stumbled out, “Er, we were told to talk to you. About a spell. Are you the Weftwitch?”

“I am,” she said. Her bright eyes flicked past me to Sylvester.

“Feeling a bit queasy, are we?” she said to him, and chuckled. “My little forest doesn’t usually agree with your kind.”

Sylvester did still look pretty green.

“I don’t usually see anyone accompanying them, though,” she said to me, looking me up and down. “No, you’re something quite different altogether.”

“I’m not a magic-worker, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“Indeed not,” she agreed, her small, shrewd eyes piercing me. “Well, I suppose you had better come inside.”

She clapped her hands together, releasing a small puff of flour from beneath her nails, and nudged at something at foot-level. I saw an extremely fat and extremely well-feathered hen hop back with an offended rattle of wings.

“Sorry,” she said. “Come in.”

I stepped over the threshold, which, if the old stories were true, meant that I was under the witch’s power now. I didn’t feel like I was under anyone’s power, however.

The cottage looked like any other cozy, well-kept house back in my village and made me feel at home—even down to the chickens that swarmed around my feet and huffed along to keep up with my stride.

Sylvester followed more cautiously, picking his way through the birds with his bare feet, wrinkling his nose when one of them brushed up against his legs.

“They’re just chickens,” said the woman. “They won’t bite.”

Sylvester hissed through his teeth as one of them investigated his toes.

“They will give you a hell of a peck, I’ll say that,” added the woman.

We were in her kitchen. A large iron stove took up almost half the room, with dozens of mysterious drawers and knobs and whistling, wheezing parts.

A large orange cat was asleep on part of it, his tail and one leg hanging down dangerously close to a little window through which showed an open flame. His tail twitched lazily back and forth, like the pendulum of a clock, narrowly escaping singeing each time. I wondered what Cornelius would have made of him.

What little was left of the kitchen after the stove had filled it up contained a kitchen table with four chairs pulled up to it, and washed flagstones, and a very ordinary collection of household objects in one corner: brooms, buckets, a dustpan and brush, a roll of netting, and assorted walking sticks. Nothing that seemed at all magical or exceptional.

The tea the Weftwitch poured for us was just tea, and didn’t bubble or turn green or melt a hole in the rough pottery cups. Her cottage stayed solid on its foundations and didn’t shimmer, or shiver, or show any signs of life at all.

I sat in one of the chairs and accepted a cup, and Sylvester sat on the very edge of another, folding himself awkwardly into something that resembled a human sitting on a chair.

Without his throne to lounge in, he looked a little lost, and ridiculously too tall and lanky for the little room. Being half naked didn’t help.

In this terribly ordinary place, however, he looked even more extraordinary than he usually did—his cheekbones more dramatically slanted, his eyes more piercingly gray blue, and his whole being so strange, so unnaturally beautiful, that even the cat half asleep on the stove twitched an eye open to stare.

The witch woman, however, didn’t seem intimidated. She pushed another cup of tea over to him, and the sugar bowl.

“These magic folks,” she said to me. “Mad about sugar, all of them. Anything sweet. It’s the magic, you see. Makes everything taste just a little sour. Something to do with how it reacts with the body ... coats the tongue somewhat.”

Sylvester gave a grudging, “Thank you,” and I noticed that he spooned about six heaps of sugar into his tea.

“How do you know?” I asked. “Do you have magic-workers in your kingdom?”

She snorted. “Like him? No, we wouldn’t stand for it. Not anymore. Not that sort. Poor thing.”

I couldn’t imagine why anyone would call Sylvester a poor thing. Even dressed as oddly as he was, he looked lordly, and nowhere near an object of pity.

“We have our own type of magic-workers here. Not in the way you understand them,” she continued.

“We saw a boy, in the settlement,” I said. “He had magic, a little ...”

“Yes, no one has more than a little.” She sipped her tea. “Your king saw to that.”

“What?” I said sharply. “How?”

“Our kingdoms used to be one and the same,” she explained. “A very long time ago. Did you know that? No, of course not. Your king has an unnaturally long life, as you may know, because of his ... practices.” She sipped her tea.

“He was prince over both our lands, once, but craved more power. He saw that some children were born with something—a spark, a brightness—that could be turned to magic. It happened a few times in every generation. People knew about it but did not trouble themselves overly. For the most part, the children used it for childish pursuits—magicking themselves odd little toys, starting fires, playing pranks.”

I shot a glance at Sylvester.

“Your king, however, saw the potential for great power. He had a similar spark, and started experimenting on himself and these others to see exactly what could be achieved. He did this in secret for a while, but you can imagine that people did not take kindly to it when it was found out—particularly as the children he took for these purposes were never seen again.

“His own father, our king, did not take kindly to it either. He disowned his son, and would have banished him, but when he announced the banishment in front of his council, Prince Darius murdered his father in a rage. The rest of the royal family sought to capture and punish him, but Darius took his magic and his new knowledge, and split the kingdom in two, walling one half off from the other. Us, and you. The Invisible Kingdom.” She paused to take another sip.

“Over the last century, the boundary between us has grown stronger, almost too strong for us to penetrate, and we knew little about what was happening there. Occasionally someone wandered through without being entirely consumed, but usually the mist had stolen both their wits and their health, and they didn’t last long.”

This was all astonishing to hear. “And King Darius is still trying to expand the kingdom,” I said. “And pushing into yours.”

“More and more each year. If no one tries to stop him, he will swallow us completely. And not just us, but other nations too. Yes, there is a whole world out there, beyond your borders. That’s why I’m here and why I do the work that I do, to resist it.”

I glared at Sylvester. “Did you know any of this?”

“I had suspicions,” admitted Sylvester. “I found it odd that the kingdom was closed in on itself, reliant on our magic. But no, I did not know. And I’m ashamed to say I didn’t care much before ...” He flushed.

“Before? Before what?”

“Before you,” he finished simply.

I stared at him. The Weftwitch swallowed the last of her tea, swirled the dregs around, then stared at the leaves. “Hmmm. Interesting. Now, you and I will take a walk, and leave your magic friend here to amuse himself for a few minutes. We need to talk.”

I looked over at Sylvester, who shrugged, nearly dislodging his makeshift garment.

“Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone,” I said, standing up.

“Sweet boy,” said the Weftwitch. “For a magic-worker.”

I swear he blushed.

The Weftwitch led me outside to her garden and stooped to pull up a few weeds. “Would you mind?” she said, gesturing at the neighboring bed. “My back.”

I knelt in the grass and pulled weeds of my own. The earth was dark and bitter as coffee, the plants indecently green and full of juice. This was a healthy place, and I felt healthy in it.

“You are like me,” she said conversationally.

“A witch?” I said, startled. She honked out a laugh.

“Dear child. No. The opposite of a witch, in fact. I have no magic.”

“But ...”

“No, what I have is the opposite of magic,” she said. “A resistance to magic so strong that it can almost seem magical.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Oh, believe me, neither did I, before I figured it out,” she said. “Confused me to no end, at first. We use magic differently here than you do in your kingdom, and it’s not confined to just one special group. Lots of people have magic of one kind or another, even if it’s as small as getting a kettle to boil a wee bit faster.” She moved to another bed, and I followed.

“You need people who are resistant to magic, too, to balance it out. That’s why they call me the Weftwitch—warp and weft, do you see, like weaving cloth? Both are necessary.” She straightened up, stretching her back, before continuing to weed.

“Those with no magic, or a resistance to it, are celebrated here as the most powerful. Being the Weftwitch is a great honor. I work with the magic-workers to help them control their magic, give it limits. You have seen yourself how wild it can run without someone like me to contain it. It is its own sort of power.”

I thought back to how I had quashed Sylvester’s disastrous spell in the House, how I had helped him open the door to the chamber where Millie was prisoner. I suppose I could see how the presence of resistance, control, could keep balance in the complicated system that magic seemed to be.

“But real magic needs hearts,” I said. “We were always told ...”

“Oh, that’s what they tell you,” she said. “They wouldn’t want you thinking that everyone had a bit of magic in them, oh no. You have to be some special, fancy royal person to have magic, is what they’d have you think. But you do not need hearts to perform magic. There are other ways.”

“Well yes, but only for small things. Not for big, grand magicks, like the sorceresses do.”

She snorted. “Not so. Heart magic is powerful, yes, but not the only powerful kind.”

I blinked. “So, they don’t have to use hearts at all?”

“For their kind of magic, they do,” she explained, “But it’s a dark, consuming kind. And it’s greedy. Stealing the magic from other people—well, let me put it this way. If you train a dog with kindness, it’ll do what you tell it and be loyal. If you train a dog with beatings and the like, it might do what you say, but it also might turn on you, given the opportunity.”

“... And magic is the dog?”

“It is. Fair comparison, too. It comes when you call. It obeys, most of the time. But it has teeth.”

I had known that the magic Sylvester and the other magic- workers did was wrong somehow, unnatural. What I was having more trouble wrapping my head around was the fact that everyone could have a little magic in them, and that it could be a gentle, natural thing, with no blood or sacrifice necessary.

“So, they’re not just taking hearts,” I said. “They’re taking whatever magicks someone has inside them?”

“Yes,” the Weftwitch said. “Which is contained in the heart, I suppose, or part of it. Someone’s magic is all bound up with the rest of them, though, and you can’t take it out without doing damage.”

“And some people have more than others.”

“Right,” she said. “And some have none. Everyone called me a wet blanket when I was a child. I spoiled the fun whenever I turned up. If I were in a house, the kettle wouldn’t boil, the bread wouldn’t rise, and the hens wouldn’t lay.”

She sighed, then continued, “I thought I was just bad luck for the longest time, until I figured that something about me stopped magic from working. Even everyday things like water boiling and dough rising take a tiny spark of magic, and I sucked away every little spark I could without realizing it.”

I thought back on my life in the village.

“I don’t remember things like that happening,” I said. “Although I rarely went into anyone’s house but our own. I certainly never had the best of luck, but I kept house for my Da and me right enough and worked in the shop.” I thought harder. “I always thought I was cursed, and that’s why I never seemed to do that well when it came to other people.”

“Cursed?”

“Because my mother died when I was born. That hardly ever happens, and when it does, it means there is something wrong with the child. Or that’s what we believe, at least.”

“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,” said the Weftwich. “Utter nonsense. That’s what comes from letting heart magic run wild—everyone relies on magic and forgets common sense.”

She shook her head. “Even the most basic knowledge of human anatomy and medicine will tell you that your mother’s death could have been for any one of a number of reasons. It happens here all the time, because we’re not living under your so-called ‘protections.’ It is always a tragedy, but no one is wrong for it, and there is certainly no one to blame.”

I let out a long breath. “I thought it was what made me different.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but the amount of magic resistance you have is certainly unusual, and it would probably have given you some trouble as a young one without someone there to guide you. Here, a young woman like you would be apprenticed to someone like me, to learn how to use her gift. Because it is a gift, my dear, and not a curse.”

“Then why did Sylvester—or some part of him—pick me out of all that crowd, if I were resistant to magic?” I asked. “Surely I’d be the last person he’d seek out to harvest.”

She tapped her index finger against her bottom lip, frowning in thought. “Accident. Or fate, if you believe in that sort of thing. Either way, it was good luck for us.”

“And can you indeed repair the hearts? I was told ...”

But she was already shaking her head. “I am sorry, my dear.”

I sagged. “Then there is no hope. We thought—we were told—that you could repair all the hearts, and those whose hearts had been taken.”

“No,” she said. “But I might be able to help you keep it from happening to anyone else.”

She was looking at me with a strangely bright, direct look that made me want to dart my own eyes away. “What do you mean?” I asked, still reeling from the news that I was going to live out the rest of my life with half a heart.

I thought I had hardened myself to the possibility that I would never be whole again, but I suppose some part of me had held out hope that Basil’s promises were genuine. When I thought about it, though, it seemed absurd.

“Have you wondered about the corruption, at all? Where it came from?”

“You know about that?” I asked, startled.

“Dear child, I helped create it. All of us here have been working on it for a long time. We needed something to slow the spread of your kingdom, and to stop your king in his tracks. It has taken us decades, but we finally came up with a concoction that would cause his store of hearts to sicken and slipped it through the mist whenever we were able.

“As I said, some are able to get through the mist without being consumed, and they were willing to make that sacrifice, despite them not surviving long on the other side. We got enough of the corruption through to take hold of the king’s store.”

“You made it?” I said, unbelieving. “But it just made things worse! The king is just going to harvest more hearts! It won’t stop him! All you have done is doomed all the ordinary, nonmagic people in our kingdom!”

“Perhaps not,” she said. “It is very fortunate that you should have come here. You see, spreading the disease in your kingdom was only half the plan. The other half was to rid us of the king and his children ,” she snorted, “altogether.”

I stared at her.

“We had hoped that the corruption we created would work on them, too, but it wasn’t strong enough. Luckily, since then, we have been able to create one even more powerful, that will work beautifully.”

She looked at me carefully. “The trouble is, we need to get it through the mist, and the weak points we used before have been much harder to breach since the king realized he was under attack and tightened up his wards against us. We managed to get a few letters through, hoping to reach those who had already been caught in the magic-workers’ spell, and tempt one through to help us take this new corruption back.”

“The map,” I realized. “Basil had a map with your name on it.”

“That’s it,” she said. “We thought we may have to wait a decade or more before someone from the Invisible Kingdom made it through to us, if they made it at all. They had a better chance of getting back into their own kingdom afterward, and taking our new concoction with them, as the king would not be looking for one of his own people.”

“You tricked them?” I said. “The Snagged?” I saw them fall in my mind’s eye again—Basil, Nat, Em, all of them, tempted by a false promise of hope and healing, and rage rose in my gullet.

“It was the only way,” said the Weftwitch. “And it worked, didn’t it?”

She looked at me with her small, bright eyes.

“Wait ... You want us to take it back?”

She spread her hands. “What could be more perfect? You want the king gone as much as we do.”

“I don’t even know if we can get back,” I said. “Not without ...” I broke off. I didn’t want to tell her how we had bought our way in. “Why can’t you take it?” I said instead. “You said magic doesn’t touch you.”

“Ah, but the king knows about me and has set particular wards to warn him of my approach if I dare to try. I would have tried, if there was no alternative, but,” she spread her hands, “here you are.”

“And even if we do get it through ... This new mold, or whatever it is, will infect the king and all his children?”

“Yes.”

“Then what about Sylvester?” I asked.

She hesitated. For the first time, a shadow crossed her face. “Well,” she said carefully, “he is a magic-worker.”

“You yourself called him a sweet boy,” I reminded her.

She laughed a little. “He’s not the worst of them,” she said. “But you have to remember, he’s not really a person at all. Not as we understand it. He is a made thing, like a music box or a marionette. A toy for the king, fashioned out of the remains of a boy who will never come back to life, not as he was.”

“But just because he is a made thing does not mean he should be unmade,” I protested. “And he is helping me.”

“Yes,” she said gently, in a tone as soft as if she were telling a child that their beloved pet lamb had to be sacrificed for the family pot. “He has been helpful, I know. He is unusual. Perhaps because he is the only male magic-worker who has survived the king’s process of creation—perhaps there was a fault in his making. It is to our advantage.”

It felt wrong, to be discussing my sorcerer as if he were little more than one of the sharp-edged little animals that Da used to fold out of the butcher paper, to be crumpled and thrown away at day’s end.

But he was a toy for the king, as she had said. And a dangerous one, at that. All the same, was it right to use him as a toy for our own game?

“I understand your feelings,” she said. “You have been bound to him for a time.”

“But I am not bound to him here,” I said, “And I still don’t feel right about using him in this way, knowing that he will die along with the others.”

“Of course,” she said, spreading her hands. “And if there was another way, we would do that.”

“But there isn’t,” I said, letting my voice trail off so it was more like a question.

“But there isn’t,” she agreed. “Look, even if you do not take it, we will eventually find another way to get it there. And this way, you have a chance to save your family and friends before the king’s great harvest.”

I couldn’t think of what to say.

“Do you have some small object I could borrow?” she asked. “Some trinket?”

“Um. . .” I rummaged through my pockets and came up with the little raven seal. “This?”

“Perfect.” She enfolded it in her hand; her fingernails were caked with earth. “I will enclose a seed of the disease in this seal. Then all you have to do is will it, whenever you are ready, and it will come out. Or you can keep it sealed”—she chuckled at her own pun—“forever. Entirely up to you. Although, as I have said, we will find another way in eventually.”