Chapter Thirty-One
I shout and kick the wall, but neither Sylvie nor the MacDougals come running. I wonder if he placed a muffling charm outside my room, or a sleeping charm on theirs, to keep them from hearing my pleas.
In either case, I realize I’m the only one who can possibly free myself.
I look around at everything within my grasp; there is nothing.
Conrad’s mother’s shawl has slipped off the footboard and piled on the floor, its threads just out of reach.
My hands are securely fastened, and though I pull and twist and curse, they will not come free.
I keep trying until my wrists are raw and stinging.
Then, gasping out a sob, I slump over, strands of my hair stuck to my lips and my neck from sweat.
What will Morgaine do to him?
He may claim she is not the villain I think her to be, but I saw the dread in his eyes when he turned to go.
She took one of his ancestor’s eyes for simply trying to run away.
He swore to take responsibility for me, and yet I fooled him.
His love for me put her rule at risk. What punishment will she exact? An eye? A hand? His life?
I have to reach Elfhame and explain myself. Perhaps I can offer her information on Lachlan in exchange for Conrad. More deals. More bargains. Fates, I’m a fool, but I am a desperate one.
With renewed vigor I struggle, thrashing and yanking my wrists until they bleed. Finally, panting and sore, my heart a hot coal in my breast, I force myself to draw even breaths and think.
There is not a chance of reaching my threadkit; the box lies out of my reach by nearly a yard. Nor could I reach the tasseled edge of the Anatolian carpet, or the ribbon tied around the window drapes.
Only one potential material lies within my grasp, I realize.
Steeling myself, I grasp several strands of hair and yank them loose.
The pain is sharp but fleeting, and nothing to the pounding mallet of my heart.
My ribs feel like they’re beginning to splinter, as if one more fit of pain might shatter them entirely and pierce my heart through with their jagged ends.
Concentrating hard, eyes shut against the darkness, I rely only on my sense of touch, on my five nimble fingers and the impossibly fine hairs twisted around them.
The first attempt I fumble at once, and the hairs fall from my fingers without so much as a whisper. Growling, I pull out more. Fates, if at the end of this night I have a bald patch—
Oh, you fool, if there was ever a worse time for vanity . . . !
The next attempt goes better. I manage half a knot before the hair snaps.
Taking a moment to recenter myself, I try again.
I close my eyes and picture the hair, one single strand finer than any thread, pinched between my thumb and forefinger.
My wrist stings where it chafed against the manacle of the mangled sconce.
I push away the pain, pack it down and stamp on it until it’s nothing more than a dull prick at the back of my mind.
Slowly, carefully, I catch the hair with my little finger, securing it taut against my palm.
Then my middle fingers go to work, dipping, looping, pulling.
Twisting themselves as no finger is meant to twist.
I can barely feel the hair at all, so light and thin it is, as insubstantial as the faerie queen’s spiderwebs. Will she kill Conrad with magic, I wonder, or will she resort to a more traditional method—a knife, poison, a garrote?
No, no, I cannot lose my focus now.
Third loop from the left. Pull taut. Wind behind middle finger, pull through fifth loop. Pull taut.
It is no complex spell, really; with thread and two hands and good light I could Weave it in a heartbeat. Curse Conrad! He could have at least left me one free hand.
Thread beneath sixth layer. Over the fourth. Pull taut—
The hair snaps.
A feral cry of frustration rips from my throat before I can stop it.
But I still have the rest of the knot woven, and a finger’s length of hair left pinched between my thumb and little finger. If I can only manage to loop it over my middle finger . . .
There!
I don’t wait a moment to double-check the knot; I channel fast and recklessly, pulling from the ivy just unfurling new leaves outside my window. They wither and go dry, a shoddy bit of work on my part, but I don’t care much about the rules right now.
The hair crumbles to ash almost as soon as it flares with magic. That is how thin and poor a material it is. But it works.
The nail holding the sconce to the wall pops loose and drops with a soft tink on the floorboards, helped along, no doubt, by my wild thrashing earlier.
With a sob of relief, I pry the wooden manacle off my other hand and then pitch forward onto my knees.
It takes me a moment to rise again. I hadn’t realized how much strength I’d expended in my struggle, unless my weakness is in part due to the draining of my heart.
It pulses red hot as I lurch upright, every beat driving the pain deeper, as if it were working its way to my soul.
“Right,” I say through my teeth, as I wrap the ribbons from the drapes around my bloody wrists as makeshift bandages. The sea silk I bind around the left, over the ribbon. “Now for the difficult part.”
The circle is deserted when I reach it. Roman dances beneath me, withers shifting as he sidesteps nervously just outside the stones.
I slide to the ground and pat his haunch, giving him permission to run home.
He bolts with his tail raised like a white silk banner, though he pauses at the tree line to give me a guilty look.
“Get out of here,” I say, waving a hand. And either his fear or the empathy knot I tied in his mane does the trick. He vanishes into the trees, a ghost into the night.
The unnatural stillness of the circle is a smothering pall on the air. The stones themselves loom defiantly, mottled gray under the full moon that hangs above. The grass is as thick as fur, silver and long, the stalks already bending beneath pearls of dew. My skirts are soon damp.
The wet grass proves to be my advantage: I see the imprinted traces of Conrad’s boots in it. He passed through not long ago and unwittingly left a path for me.
I make my way through the spider-thread wards, careful step by careful step, placing my shoes in Conrad’s prints. I brace, ready to be hurled off my feet as I was the first time I snooped around the circle. But I make it through unharmed and let out a relieved breath.
Striding to the center of the circle, I keep my chin high, as if to prove to the stones that I am not afraid.
They are like a silent ring of judges, gazing into my soul, my past, my purposes, draining the truth of me from my bones.
They are so very impassive, like the Sphinx from the old stories, or the Delphi oracle.
“If you’ve any wisdom to share,” I say, glaring at the largest of them, “don’t be stingy about it.”
I shiver as I feel the sudden sense of pressure in the air, as if the stones were leaning toward me.
On second thought, maybe I ought not provoke them.
Instead, I sink onto the ground, my dirty, damp gray skirt pooling around me.
I look up at the stones, the budding branches of the oaks and yews, the soft glow of the moon.
The cool air of the forest seeps into my skin and wraps around my heart like a balm.
I savor it, drink it in, let it soothe the pain in my wrists and chest.
I think of Conrad North.
I think of him standing in this spot, weeks ago, thread unspooling between his fingers. But I cannot remember the pattern, only the shape of him against the dark, dancing among the stones . . .
Dancing.
I recall with a start when he put his hand on my waist and spun me on the floor of Elfhame, to the furious drumming of the immortal band.
That night, beneath the glowing fruit of the Dwirra Tree, he’d been more than a laird—a prince, his hair glittering with faerie dust, his eyes holding secrets like candle flames behind dark windows.
How sure of the steps he’d been then, how sure of his place in the dance, even though he’d been not at all sure of me.
I think of him that night, remembered through the smoky haze of the fae forgetting spells, so that the edges of the memories are all faded, soft paper handled over many years.
I feel the heat of his hand on my waist, the strength of his grip, the command in his eyes.
He did not have to intercede for me that night.
He could easily have let Morgaine expunge my memory and keep me as her pet or servant or footstool.
But he hadn’t.
Instead, he’d risked his life to speak for mine. He’d bought my freedom with his troth, and it was my faithlessness and foolish fears which had deceived him, made him think me worthier than I am.
I will not let him die for me.
I will not let these stones outwit me.
With the memory of that dance sharpening in my thoughts, I rise and take up a spool of white thread.
I know that to open the way to the faerie green, Lachlan had told me, you must pay homage to its queen.
Now I understand, and I unwind the thread as I begin to dance.
I cannot think beyond the moment, beyond a single step.
I don’t know the full measure of the faerie’s dance, how it begins or how it ends, I only know what it felt like to dance those steps with Conrad holding me fast. I only know how I felt when he bent his head to mine and whispered in my ear, so that I could feel the heat of his breath on my bare neck.
Keep your eyes on me.
I imagine him here with me now, the fire in his tiger eyes, the warmth of his skin, the smell of the juniper in his lapel and his bergamot soap, as he guides me from stone to stone, his hand on mine as thread feeds through my fingers.
No matter what, keep your eyes on me.
The faerie queen had called the revel an “homage,” her people’s celebration of her rule.
I had forgotten, but now the words echo through me again.
Of course Lachlan would not know these steps, he who was thrown out of Elfhame on the day Morgaine became its queen.
I doubt he would bend his pride to learn them, for it would mean acknowledging the crown on his sister’s head.
No doubt when he ruled Elfhame, the spell was some other form of homage to him, a dance or some other pattern that would only be known to those who had paid tribute to him before.
I dance round and round the circle, hardly paying attention to the thread, not thinking of where I will spin next or what stone I will twist my knot around. It just happens, the spell part of the dance, the dance part of me.
Soon there is a web strung across the circle, layers of thread glittering like spun silver. The dance takes even these into account, spinning or lowering me just at the right moment, so that I pass within a handsbreadth of the threads without disturbing them.
Faintly, I wonder how I must look. If someone came wandering out of the wood and saw me whirling about in silence, eyes half shut, spinning thread like a spider, they would think me possessed.
The dance is accelerating now, reaching a crescendo.
The steady flow of it becomes a heady, tumbling cascade, faster and wilder, more demanding.
I must leap over threads, then duck beneath them, keeping my line taut.
Some stretch above my head; others so low in the grass I cannot even see them, but the dance knows they are there.
The dance guides me deftly over them. I sense now that if I faltered for a second, if I lost even an ounce of trust in my memory of that night, I’d lose all sense of it entirely.
The dance would abandon me and leave me standing in the middle of the dark wood with nothing but a pile of strings.
It is as much a test of faith as a pattern for magic.
It will show me the way, but only if I am worthy of it.
My wrists are feeling the exertion, the bandages loosened by my movements. One ribbon unwinds entirely and drifts to the ground; the other hangs in loose tatters.
I can’t stop for them, or for anything else. My heart, strangely, has stopped paining me. I wonder if Lachlan knows I am here and approves of my efforts. Perhaps so long as I stay on his ordained path, it will not trouble me at all.
Ruthlessly, I wrench my thoughts away from the pains, or lack of pain, and scour every conscious thought from my head. I’ve come too far to fail now due to a wandering mind. I let the dance take full control of my limbs, until I am a puppet operated by memory and instinct alone.
And then, all at once, it is done.
I whirl and then stop, my hands above my head, my feet spread, my chest rising and falling as I pant for breath.
The spool in my hand is empty, but the last length of thread is caught between my thumb and forefinger.
The spell is complete; all it awaits is magic to fuel it.
The dance ended with me in the center of the circle, a spider at the middle of her web, surrounded on all sides by crisscrossing white lines, taut and trembling.
My exhalation fogs the air and dissipates into the threads, pale and then gone.
Carefully, I tie off the knot, then let the empty wooden spool drop to the grass. Then I reach wide, take hold of the thread to my right and left, and channel.
The old magic of the forest rises to meet me, as if it had been waiting impatiently for this moment, and my invitation. Like a gust of wind through an open doorway it roars into me, and I gasp.
It has been years since I felt a power like this.
Lachlan must have released his hold on me almost entirely, giving me full access to the energy around me for the first time since . . .
Since before I ever met him.
I cannot ever recall a strength like this, a torrent of magic rushing through me, with only the slightest reproach from my heart, just enough of a squeeze to remind me that somewhere, leagues distant, the exiled faerie king is still holding the other end of the string that binds me.
Well, curse Lachlan and his plans. It occurs to me that not once since Conrad left me in my room have I thought of how I’ll acquire a branch from the Dwirra.
I’m going to reach Elfhame, I know that now.
And as I release the flood of magic swirling in my heart, my fingertips glowing where it wicks into the threads, I know that when I step through the portal, I will do it not for the faerie king or his followers, or for my stolen heart, or for all the magic in the world.
I will do it for the man who gave me silk from the sea. I will save him, as he saved me.
No matter the cost.
No matter what the queen of Elfhame might demand of me.