Chapter Twelve
At breakfast the next morning, Sylvie North beams at me over her oats and milk.
Notably absent is her brother, who has ostensibly set off to meet with some crofters in Blackswire to discuss spring plantings.
I am a little surprised he is not determined to perch over Sylvie and me all morning, like a dark crow waiting to swoop down and peck my hands for so much as touching a spool of thread.
I soon find out my fears were not far off, however, when Mrs. MacDougal announces she will spend the day dusting the library, where it just so happens I planned to hold Sylvie’s lessons.
So the housekeeper is to be Mr. North’s spy.
“What should we do first?” Sylvie asks, curling up into a great armchair by the hearth.
Mr. MacDougal lights a fire before stamping off to tend his sheep.
The licking orange flames drive back the gloom of yet another rainy morning.
Droplets run in pretty patterns down the arched windows, tracing down the glass like pale ribbons.
I take out a small list I wrote out last night to distract myself from thinking of Lachlan and Lorellan and the other faeries.
The weight of their plight is an added pressure, entirely reframing my understanding of my mission here.
Their lives apparently depend on me opening their way home.
I can still feel the dampness of Lachlan’s tear on my thumb.
I can still see the glistening, desperate hope in his eyes.
How startlingly human he revealed himself to be.
And here is Sylvie North, with her large, similarly hopeful gaze fastened upon me, depending on me as well.
“I need some idea of how far you are into each subject,” I say, running a finger down my list. “We’ll do some informal exams on history, science, literature, arithmetic, geography . . .”
Sylvie’s eyes glass over, the eager smile on her face turning to a grimace of dread. My finger pauses on the list, tapping thoughtfully.
“Let’s start with geography,” I say. “Does your brother have any atlases in here?”
We search the shelves, moving under the watchful gaze of Mrs. MacDougal, who dusts each book one by one as assiduously as if she were about to hand them to Queen Victoria herself.
“Ah!” Sylvie hauls a large leather-bound tome from a bottom shelf. “Maps of the Known World. Is that what you want?”
“Good find.” I hide my disappointment. I had been hoping for something closer to home. A map of Scottish faerie gateways, perhaps? The estate map I stole from this room two nights ago proved little use, and it seems today will turn up naught else of value to my search.
I take the atlas from Sylvie, and we open it. But inside, rather than neat pages of maps, I find a jumble of torn paper. Pieces flutter down and pile on the carpet, torn, their ragged edges pale as scars.
Every map within has been shredded to bits.
“Tch!” Mrs. MacDougal swoops in, her goose-feather duster all aflutter. “Such a mess!”
“No, wait.” I raise a hand to forestall her. “It’s like a puzzle, Sylvie. An excellent way to test your geography.” Picking up a sliver of west Africa, I extend it to her. “Let’s see how far you can get.”
While Sylvie works at piecing together the maps, I notice Mrs. MacDougal watching her with a sorrowful expression. At my inquisitive look, the housekeeper clears her throat.
“It was one of Mr. North’s favorite books, when he was a wain,” she says. “Oh, he’d spend hours over those maps.”
“Was he the one who tore them up?” I ask indignantly.
A sad smile tugs at her lips, but then she gives herself a small shake and turns back to her dusting. “Just you mind your student, Miss Pryor, and let the past be.”
I realize then that Sylvie has stopped piecing together maps and is instead folding the torn papers into tiny swords. Finding she’s been caught, she gives me a sheepish grin and smooths them out again.
By noon, with a bit of help, Sylvie’s managed to assemble most of the maps.
We discuss them for a while over lunch in the kitchen, and I find her more knowledgeable than I’d feared, but still a year or so behind where she should be for her age.
After writing up a plan to help her catch up in her geography studies, I declare the subject done for the day.
The rain has stopped, and though the world is wet and gray, we will take what escape we can get.
“You mean I can finally go outside?” She gives a relieved whoop and rushes for her boots.
“Outside to practice multiplication,” I clarify. “We don’t have apples this time of year, but I think we could scrounge up some rocks.”
“Oh.” Her exuberance diminished, she nevertheless puts on her boots and heads gamely out the door.
I follow, pausing to look back at Mrs. MacDougal. “Will you be joining us, then?”
The housekeeper, installed in her chair by the stove, groans. “Ach, get on with you. I am an old woman. I cannae be expected to traipse about the countryside all the livelong day! If Mr. North wants you watched, he can bloody well watch you himself!”
Smiling, I pull the door shut and catch up with Sylvie, who is pouncing on every puddle in sight. She grins when she realizes Mrs. MacDougal won’t be shadowing us.
“Now you can show me some magic!” she cries.
“Sylvie.” I glance at the house. “You know I can’t do that.”
She sighs and kicks a stone across the drive. “I know.”
Taking her hand, I give it a squeeze. “Come. Why don’t you show me which burn around here has the best rocks for counting?”
Her smile flashes back onto her face, and she drags me away over the heather.
A small creek winds through the moors behind the house, feeding a series of small ponds where a few soggy sheep gather.
While Sylvie collects stones, her skirts tied above her knees, I furtively Weave a subtle drying spell over a boulder, my back turned so she can’t see.
Once the water’s evaporated from its surface, I sit and quietly let the ashes of the consumed thread trickle from my fingers into the scrubby brush.
“There,” Sylvie says breathlessly, dumping an armload of stones at my feet. “I bet that would have been easier with magic.”
“It would have been,” I admit. “Now, multiplication is based on—”
“How old were you when you learned you could do magic?” Sylvie tosses a small rock from hand to hand, watching me.
“Sylvie . . .”
“You don’t have to show me magic. Just tell me about yourself.”
“I cannot.”
“Please.”
“I gave my word.”
She stares at me in a manner I know well—and dread—after my years of teaching. It is the look a particularly devilish pupil gives before she decides to do precisely what she’s been told not to.
All at once, Sylvie jumps up and sprints away.
“Sylvie!” I start after her, hampered by my skirts. Lifting them over my ankles, I try to keep up with the girl’s energetic pace. “Sylvie, come back!”
She runs over one hill and then another, as the wind picks up and rain begins to sluice down again. I slip and slide in the mud that seems to have no effect on Sylvie.
By the time I catch up with her, she’s reached the south-facing side of Toren’s Rise, the steep, rocky bluff as high as Ravensgate Manor’s pitched roof. I call her name, only for the wind to steal the words from my lips.
Sylvie begins to climb the slippery rocks.
“No!” I reach for her skirt but grab empty air as she hoists herself higher. “Please come down!”
Sylvie gazes down at me, her eyes fierce. “How old were you,” she calls, “when you learned you had magic?”
“This is no civilized way to conduct a conversation!”
“I am no civilized girl!” she hurls back, laughing.
Desperately, I look around, scanning the empty moors. We are completely alone, and Sylvie climbs ever higher.
“How old were you?” she shouts again.
It would be easier to deny her curiosity if I didn’t see so much of myself in her. A lonely child, locked away from the world, denied freedom and education. Begging to be seen, to be respected. She may not have magic as I did, but she has all the same longing in her. The same hidden ferocity.
“I was six,” I call out at last.
She reaches a small outcrop and drags herself onto it, perching there like a cat on a clock. Swinging her legs, heedless of the rain, she leans over and shouts, “And so your auntie sent you off to magic school?”
“No, that came later.”
She props her chin in her hands, gazing down at me with those great, hungry eyes. “What was it like? Your school?”
“Can we please have this conversation on the ground?”
“I’ll come down when you’ve told me about your school!”
Bloody-minded little . . . She is as infuriating as her brother.
I push my wet hair back and concede, if it is the only thing that will convince the mad creature to come down to safety.
“It could be difficult, at times. As I told you, my classmates could be cruel. But many of them were quite nice.” I think of my friend Orla, who went to Ireland to teach in Dublin, and of Lisette, who used to braid my hair and sing to me in French.
She’s in a convent in Austria now, I believe, devoting her life to the Fates and embroidering comfort shrouds for the dying.
“Despite the hardships, it was the happiest I’d ever been.” I press my hands to the rock, beseeching her. “Please come down now.”
She nods graciously and turns herself around to clamber back the way she’d come up.
But her boot slips on a loose crag of shale, the rock splintering under her weight.
“Sylvie!”
She yelps, scrabbling for purchase. Her fingers grip the wet ledge, legs swinging in midair. Any moment, she’ll slip and plummet five yards—a potentially fatal drop.
“Hold on!” I cry, tugging thread from my pocket. “Don’t let go!”
I struggle with the thread, its fibers already soaked in the rain. The wind pulls at the knot I Weave between my fingers, as if trying its best to undo the spell as quickly as I compose it.
“Miss Pryor!” Sylvie cries, as her left hand loses its grip. The other slips inch by inch.