Chapter Nineteen
Conrad moves with sure-footedness in the black night and does not light his way until he is well away from the manor. I see a knot of fire bloom ahead and hang back; it is no lantern, but a fire spell, the conjured flame twisting gently over his hand.
“Oh, you disingenuous bastard,” I mutter. “You bloody-minded, lying hypocrite!”
I am still grappling with the revelation that he’s not only had magic, he’s been actively Weaving this entire time—after forbidding me, much less his sister, from so much as summoning a thimble across a room.
He has a great deal to answer for. But first, I must know where he is going.
His route is winding, following no path, but his direction seems assured. He pauses only a few times, and then I crouch low, melding into shadow until he begins to walk again.
The further he goes, the deeper my dread becomes, and the firmer my certainty. This is no idle wander, though he moves slowly, his limp and injuries paining him. He knows exactly where he is going.
It is a different wood into which I enter tonight than the one I first explored nearly a week ago.
The trees are the same, the rise and flow of the land has not changed, but the spirit of the place has shifted.
Before, I walked through it in awe, feeling small and intrusive, but not unwelcome.
I was a mouse creeping along in fleeting insignificance, of no consequence to the wood’s much vaster existence.
It admitted me with indifference and let me go my way.
But tonight, the wood pushes at me. The wide spaces between the trees teem with festering shadows.
It makes me think, insensibly, of the man who’d stood on the corner in Devil’s Acre with his python wrapped around his arm.
He would feed it mice and the children would gather to shriek as the lump of mouse slid down, down the snake’s gullet.
Now I am that mouse, being squeezed on every side, pushed deeper and deeper into the darkness, with only the distant flickering light of Conrad’s fire charm to guide me.
My thoughts tumble in a panic, and I wildly imagine that if his light were to go out, I would be swallowed up forever by this dark wood.
Not a long time later, Conrad comes to a stop, and I take up position behind a tree to watch what he will do.
The stone circle waits below, as I had known it would the moment Conrad walked past my room over an hour ago. As perhaps I’d known the moment I saw him raise his spell high and command the fury of the northern wind.
Conrad is connected to the fae. He may even be the “Gatekeeper” Tarkin mentioned—a servant to the faerie queen herself.
He steps precisely through the spider-thread wards, his movements calculated. As if he knows exactly where each one is stretched. And then, once he stands in the center of the circle, he puts out his light and begins to Weave.
The stones are, as I’d imagined, a great pegboard.
He twines thread around and between them, but it is too dark for me to see the pattern he makes, though I can see that he does so with instinctive movements, working slowly but methodically.
It is a pattern he knows well, has walked many times before.
I watch him carefully and hear nothing but the low, clattering wind. Conrad is lit only by the faint illumination of starlight reflecting off the stones. The moon is veiled behind a knot of black cloud; a storm brews in the east.
It takes him twenty minutes or so to complete the spell.
I am half crouched by the time he finishes, my legs cramping from the effort of holding so still.
My earlier panic has been replaced by bitter resolve.
I am closer than I’ve ever been to my goal, closer than Fiona got in forty years.
I feel like a predatory bird waiting high in a tree, immobile, all-seeing, waiting for the opportunity to strike.
Suddenly, the threads begin to glow. Conrad has finished and is channeling into them.
I pull behind a tree, heart in my throat, and watch.
The illumination is white and blinding, growing in the center of the circle like a star being born. I blink hard but do not look away, my pulse quickening.
The light spreads and grows, forms a shape like a great eye, broken only by the laird’s silhouette.
He stands at the epicenter of a massive, intricate Celtic knot, its complexity beyond my ability to memorize in the mere moments it is visible.
It reminds me of the spells I glimpsed in my uncle’s moorwitch book, a pattern ancient and terrible.
I hold my breath and step out from my hiding place just as Conrad North, who doesn’t believe in faeries, steps into faerie land.
Behind him, in the circle, the eye of light is beginning to shrink.
I wait as long as I can, letting him put distance between him and me.
Then I rush forward at once, without a thought for what I might do beyond reaching that gate before it closes.
I replicate his steps through the defensive wards and throw myself through the portal before it can close, unsure if I’m too late, expecting to only flop onto the mossy ground like a desperate fool.
Instead, I land in another world.