Chapter Eleven
Lachlan had described this place as the outside of the world, reality turned inside out, where the very fabric of existence might be seen in its raw form.
To my right and left, and all around, I see nothing but threads: thousands, millions of them, twisting and twining every way, and pulsing as if they were alive.
It reminds me of the backside of the tapestry itself, and I feel like an ant crawling through them.
My steps land on a woven ground which gives way slightly, as if I were walking on damp earth.
The threads around me move like rivers, stretching into infinity, no gaps between them that aren’t filled with even more threads.
In them I see every color of the spectrum, and colors I’ve never seen before, and some threads glow as if infused with magic.
Lachlan did not prepare me for this.
Where the threads rub against me, they feel nothing like wool or silk at all, but the way I’d imagine the sting of a jellyfish might feel—sharp and alive and sizzling. I flinch away from them, mind reeling, remembering Lachlan’s pointed warning not to grasp them.
This is not a power given to any, mortal or immortal, he had told me. It has been tried, and the price is always death.
My ears fill with the sound of countless rushing and whispering threads, like the roar of a fast and powerful river, and a little like the buzz of a thousand congealing voices on a busy London market day.
It’s enough to drown me if I am not careful; already I feel the many currents of threads pulling at me, threatening to sweep me away.
Lachlan had warned me to hold fast to the guide, lest I be forever lost on the wrong side of reality, and to keep my eyes shut until I was firmly through.
But terrible as this place is, I couldn’t possibly block it out; it’s the same urge I get to stare straight into the heart of a thunderstorm, even with the lightning splintering the sky around me.
I dare not remove either hand from the guiding thread, but I can still look around and boggle at the warp and weft all around.
I push through, forcing one step after another.
My mind feels as if it’s crumpling, buckling under the impossibility of this place and this magic. Lights spark in my vision, and I hurry forward faster, now watching the thread in my hands as it leads me through.
It takes no more than eight steps before I find myself pushing through the other tapestry, one which materializes before me out of the great teeming, flowing fabric all around.
Every portal, Lachlan had explained, has an anchor—a mirror of itself which forms the exit point, like two doors spread far apart.
Gasping now for air, my head aching from the effort and my stomach tossing violently, I let out a cry and throw myself through the second tapestry, and land on the dirt floor of the ruined castle, the fae all around me.
After catching my breath, I turn and see the twin to the tapestry in my room hanging behind me, fully intact despite my having just climbed through it.
It is hung on a wooden frame like a tanner’s skin, the guide thread dangling from its center.
Around it rise the stone walls of the castle ruins, and the damp moor air chills my skin.
I step away, still reeling, to search for Lachlan.
Fae glance at me as I pass, and whisper to one another in their rustling language.
I ignore them and work my way through the ruins, wrapped tightly in my shawl, one hand gripped around Fiona’s letter.
The wind whistles through the cracks and gaps in the walls.
If Lachlan is surprised to see me two days early, he does not show it.
He stands in front of the ruins, more wild and fae than I’ve seen him yet, with a silver brooch binding the lace at his throat.
His hair is unbound, pale strands loose on his shoulders and fine as silk threads.
He wears no coat, despite the cold, only an old-fashioned doublet of royal blue, shot through with silver threads, over tight breeches and knee-high black boots.
He looks like a dandy lordling out of a bygone century, and on any other person the outfit would be ridiculous.
Instead, he makes me feel underdressed and at odds with the setting, as if I am the one out of time, not he.
Lachlan spreads his hands. “Rose Pryor, did you miss me—?”
“What happened to her?” I demand, stopping short and clenching my fists. I am still trembling from my strange passage here; when I shut my eyes, I see the great forest of threads pulsing on the back of my eyelids, whispering and coiling and twisting like snakes.
Lachlan frowns. “Who?”
“The woman,” I say, thrusting the letter toward his face. “The old Weaver. Fiona.”
He blinks once, then understanding dawns in his eyes. “That old thing? She is probably dust and bones by now.”
“What happened to her? What did you do?”
His hand presses to his breast, his eyebrows arching in offense. “I? I? Fiona was you four decades ago, my dear, and just like you she was small and mortal and clever. But she failed at her task, and there was nothing I could do to save her.”
“What bargain did she make with you?”
He shrugs, squinting as if finding it difficult to recall. “A human she cared about was sick. I healed him. She knew the terms, and she agreed to them, just as you did.”
“What did she offer as collateral?”
He sighs. “It’s been so long . . .”
“Tell me!”
“Her time,” he says, blunt at last. “Or her sense of it, anyway. At least that was how I interpreted it, which was generous of me, by the way. I swear on what time I have left were her exact words, and you can guess how I might have otherwise read that. But she was a foolish one from the start. That lad she loved—the one I healed for her—moved on to woo another merely a month after Fiona departed. The girl had no sense then either, tethering herself to such a faithless wastrel.”
It must have been her Philip whom Lachlan had healed, summoned by a young Fiona out of desperation and terror. And to call due her debt, he’d then sent her on the same mission he has sent me on.
And she failed and paid a terrible price for it, living the same day over and over for forty years, still believing her beloved was waiting for her. How many of those pitiful letters did she write and never send, having no idea the years were passing her by?
I step closer to him, until I can see the dark-blue lines in his pale eyes. “Give me some other errand or task to perform. Not this, not anymore.”
“I cannot.”
“Release me, faerie, or I will—”
“What?” He steps closer, until his eyes are boring into mine and I smell the evergreen sprig he has pinned to his coat. His voice is as soft as the first wind of winter. “What will you do, Rose Pryor?”
I tilt my jaw, glaring at him.
“You summoned me,” he murmurs. “Twelve years ago. Do you think I had a choice but to appear in your house? To offer you a bargain? I did what you asked of me. Now it’s your turn. Forget Fiona. You’re stronger and smarter than she ever was, and you will succeed where she did not.”
“And if I do not, you will take my magic from me forever.”
“I did not write the rules,” he says. “I only play by them. And so do you. That is a choice you made. Now, you came all this way. You may as well give me a report.”
I release a little breath as he walks back to the castle. For a moment I stay where I am, watching the way his hair moves when he walks, like water flowing.
I imagine pulling a silver strand from his scalp and Weaving it into a rending knot, to burst the heart in his chest. Then what would become of me? Would his death set me free? Or would this bond between us, this thread of my vow, destroy me along with him?
The very idea sends a cold shudder through me. I don’t have the nerve for murder and dark magic, the kind Fiona turned to when she was desperate, draining the life out of birds to fuel her spells. And maybe Lachlan is right, and it is all my own doing, my own choices which brought me here.
In the castle, I find fae everywhere—lounging, eating, idly picking at stringed instruments.
It takes me a second to realize there are more here than there were before.
I remember counting near forty when we first left London; there are closer to sixty now.
Fates, where did they all come from? Even as I watch, another arrives and is greeted with shouts and wine by her brethren.
The fae have their own way of saying hello, placing their hands palm to palm and then resting their foreheads together while they murmur a low, synchronized phrase in their whispery tongue.
“Come and tell me what you’ve been up to,” Lachlan says, gripping my elbow and steering me away from the scene. There are two armchairs tucked beneath a brightly woven awning, a low fire burning before them in a ring of stones.
“Well?” Lachlan sits lithely, throwing one leg over the other and flicking his ringed fingers at me.
It occurs to me, suddenly and quite strangely, how very different he is from Conrad North, like winter and summer, like silver and gold.
Faerie and human. Lachlan is an ethereal creature, all light and air, as if he might shift in and out of existence with a whisper.
The laird of Ravensgate, on the other hand, is as solid as the earth, as much a part of the moors as its rocks and heather and rough, woolly sheep.
With a start, I wonder why I am comparing them at all, as if they were two racehorses I was thinking of betting on. It seems even here, Mr. North exists only to distract and delay me from my mission.
I tell Lachlan of coming across the laird in the wood, and of Mr. North’s begrudging acceptance of my lodging at Ravensgate.
“This laird of yours,” Lachlan says. “Is he handsome?”
With a start, I sit up straighter. “What?”