CHAPTER 49
Where are you going?” Bristol asked when Tyghan got out of bed. “It’s still dark.”
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered as he got dressed. “Ivy kindly canceled my meetings yesterday without telling me and moved them to dawn this morning.”
Bristol groaned. “It was a magical wedding. Don’t be too hard on her.”
“I’ll find an appropriate way to make her suffer. See you at the valley midday.” He kissed Bristol’s forehead, but as soon as he left, she forced herself out of bed too.
She never did spot Reuben last night, and she was hoping to catch him this morning before he slipped from her grasp again.
The sprawling wings of the palace housed nearly all the nobles, gentry, sorcerers, and workers who lived there.
There were a few large manors on the grounds too, where more lords and ladies lived.
And there were several isolated cottages.
Reuben lived in one of those, which didn’t surprise Bristol.
He wasn’t the sociable type, even if he liked to show off his fancy robes at parties.
Bristol hurried down the narrow trail in the predawn light.
She had to meet her squad at the stables midmorning, and she wasn’t sure how long this would take.
As she walked, she pondered Reuben’s role in all this—although knowing what part he played wouldn’t change a thing.
It couldn’t turn back time and deliver her father into the arms of his parents.
It couldn’t erase the years of running, the familiar fear that gripped her every time her parents rushed to pack and leave one town for another.
Knowing couldn’t change anything about the past, but it might give her more of the answers she came here for in the first place.
Like why? Answers she could share with her sisters to patch up the holes in their lives.
Knowing might also explain why Reuben hated her so much.
He is cruel, that one. That part didn’t surprise Bristol, and she was prepared to defend herself.
With the tick gone, she had a new proficiency with fire.
She could twist and direct it with pinpoint accuracy.
Olivia called it a kinship. Esmee called it masterful.
Reuben never commented, perhaps fearing he would suffer far more than a singed robe if she attacked him.
Maybe most of all, confronting him would put him on notice that she had something on him—his involvement in the abduction of her father.
It might be leverage if she should need his help, or might at least wipe that perpetual smug scowl off his face.
Go home, Miss Keats. You don’t belong here.
His words were still a kick in her gut, even after all this time.
She arrived at the humble little cottage. The windows were shuttered, but smoke rose from the chimney. He was up. She pounded on the chipped painted door. His home was not as meticulous as he was.
“Go away!” A string of mumbled threats followed, noting the time and idiocy of the early intrusion.
She pounded again. “I’m not going away!”
More curses, the sound of something clanking to the floor, then the door swung open, an enraged Reuben staring at her, his normally sleek hair in frizzy disarray. “Have you lost your pitifully small mind?” he said between gritted teeth.
“We need to talk. About Willow.” She pushed her way past him, and glanced around, eyeing other escapes in case she needed one. It was a cramped cottage, an unmade bed pushed up against one wall, a stove on the opposite one. Almost a hovel. No other doors, and not what she expected.
When she turned to face him, she saw that the mention of Willow’s name had punched the bluster out of him. He was silent now, but his face was a chiseled nightmare, like a gargoyle in a graveyard. But then his sunken cheeks began to flush. He blinked, his crow-like eyes flashing in the firelight.
“Coffee?” he finally said. “I was just about to pour some.”
If he was trying to shock her, he achieved his goal.
She couldn’t think of a more unlikely response, but then she realized, he was the one who was in shock.
He didn’t know what else to say. The name Willow had completely stymied him.
Master Reuben didn’t look like a master of anything at the moment.
He walked to the stove and lifted two mugs from hooks on the wall behind it. He stared at their shimmering surfaces long after he filled them with coffee, then finally picked them up and brought them to the small table in front of the fireplace. Bristol hesitated, but took a seat opposite him.
“You found Willow?” he said in an uncertain voice.
“No,” Bristol answered, “she found me. She told me about your role in my father’s abduction.”
“She’s here? Is she well?”
Well? He was asking after her well-being?
Like Bristol had simply run into an old friend?
No, she was not well. And neither was Bristol.
“She is crazed, Reuben! She’s rambling about my father and not being able to find him.
She called you cruel and said taking my father from the mortal world was your idea.
I didn’t come here for coffee, Reuben. I came for answers, and I want them now! How are you involved with Willow?”
His thin lips pressed together, and he nodded. His smug scowl was long gone—instead, he looked like a scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out of him. He couldn’t seem to focus.
“Everything, Reuben,” she said to nudge him.
“Willow,” he finally said, like he was confirming they were on the same topic. He heaved out a slow breath. “Willow is the biggest regret of my life. I could never make it right. I figured this day would come eventually. No one knew her name. No one but me. She was my secret.”
Bristol stared at the transformed Reuben, no longer the arrogant master alchemist with sharp words and haughty stares, but someone else confessing the biggest secret of his life.
“Back then—during the time period you mentioned—our relationship was new. She lived in a little shanty in the woods. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was magical.
” His dark eyes lit up with the memory. “She was magical. I’d steal away for days at a time, between my studies at the university, to be with her.
She was wild, and playful, and she completely entranced me.
I led two separate lives back then—my strict internship under the High Witch, and my untamed days with Willow.
I loved her.” He squinted at the memory.
“But, as I discovered, I didn’t love her more than my ambitions.
One day she asked me to stay and not go back to the university.
She wanted me to stay for good. We could have a baby, she said.
Wouldn’t a baby be nice, Reuben? We could be a family.
We could make this little place bigger. That was when I made my greatest mistake.
I tried to let her down gently, to tell her it was impossible, that I had a different future in front of me, but I said it all wrong.
Yes, a baby would be nice, I told her, but .
. . She never heard the but, or what came after.
I should have known. Willow was carefree and impulsive, everything that I wasn’t.
That’s what I loved about her. She was the light to my darkness. ”
Bristol sipped the last of her coffee, but Reuben’s remained untouched.
He said when he returned two days later, he heard squalling coming from the shanty.
Willow was rocking a baby, trying to calm it.
She had happily explained how she found the baby in a meadow, and that she came along just in time because surely a wolf would have eaten him.
See what a good mother I am already? she told him.
“I was horrified and told her she had to take him back, immediately. I raised my voice. I yelled at her for the first time in our relationship. She was distraught by my reaction and only remembered a meadow—a mortal meadow. I tried to help her retrace her steps but soon realized it was hopeless. Willow only lived in the happy moments of life. She couldn’t navigate the sad ones.
That was when I told her she had to take him to the queen herself.
She did as I ordered, but said I had destroyed her.
She hated me after that and never returned to her shanty.
She escaped to the mortal world, which was probably for the best. Unfortunately, the baby’s parents were never found, and he was given over to the Sisters to raise him.
I always carried guilt about it, wishing I would have been harder with Willow from the start, no mincing of words and trying to placate her, but my wishes were worthless.
So as the baby grew, I did everything I could to help him, but slyly, because I was still shamed by my mistakes with Willow.
I knew how difficult it would be for him growing up in a fae world, so over the years I made sure he had the finest amulets to amplify his skills and to protect him.
And far later, I helped Kierus when he wanted to leave Elphame once and for all. ”
As he spoke, the breath in Bristol’s lungs thinned, like she had stepped into an alternate world. A world where Reuben was an ally? “You helped my father?”
“Many times, though he proved himself quite capable, his tongue as much a weapon as anything else. He could disarm others without magic. But when I did help him, I thought that maybe it was a way to redeem Willow—and myself, especially when I helped him return to the mortal world at last. I understand he was happy there for many years. He had the life he wanted, his art, his wife, his family, you. I helped him in ways I shouldn’t have.
I was the one who planted Fritz’s bloody cloak so he could escape with your father.
And I provided a distraction so Fritz could slip into Celwyth and access Jasmine’s art collection when Kierus needed funds. ”