Chapter Thirty-Six
“Wait!” I cry, pulling Mr. MacDougal’s arm until he stops. “I know what to do!”
He and his wife look at me askance, perhaps thinking, rightfully, how I was the one to cause all this mess in the first place.
“My room,” I say. “Go to my room, and I think I can save us.”
Whatever doubts may linger in Mrs. MacDougal’s mind, she seems to brush them aside, and she grimly nods. “We’re nearly there anyway.”
Two hidden servant’s doors lead us directly to the hallway where my room is, but we have to scurry under a fallen beam to reach my door. While Mr. MacDougal shoulders it open, I listen to Lachlan calling out further down the corridor, sounding angrier now.
The door finally opens; it had been blocked by more burnt rubble. My stomach lurches, thinking the fire might have destroyed everything in here, but then I see it—the corner of my valise, where I’d dropped it on the other side of the bed.
“Open it!” I cry. “Hang up the tapestry inside.”
“What good will that do?” Mrs. MacDougal demands, as Sylvie unlatches the valise.
“You’ll see,” I tell her.
I lean against the door and hear footsteps coming down the corridor. My slippers are set against the wall, remarkably unharmed, and I pull them onto my dirty, scraped feet.
The MacDougals hang the tapestry on the curtain rod, then look at me. I nod, then push forward, Sylvie helping me along. Every step, every breath, is a knife of unbearable pain. Tears run from my eyes; they taste of salt and soot.
I take the guide thread in one hand and Sylvie’s in the other; she in turn holds Mrs. MacDougal’s hand, Mrs. MacDougal takes hold of her husband, and he grips Captain’s collar.
“Ready?” I say, my voice strained.
At that moment the door to my room bursts from its hinges and Lachlan appears in the doorway. His sword shines in his hand, and his eyes are angry blue flames.
“Stop—!”
I don’t hear the rest of his shout, because I push through the threads of the tapestry. They part once more for me, and I pull the others along.
We spill into the strange world of the shifting threads, a tangle of limbs and hands, keeping hold of each other. But another hand comes too—Lachlan took hold of Mr. MacDougal’s coat, and I turn to see his head and shoulders pushing through the tapestry, with the rest of him soon to follow.
So I do the only thing I can: I let go of the guide thread and lunge at him. I grab Lachlan by the rim of his breastplate and then push with all my strength. He gives me one startled look before I shove him through entirely, back into the bedroom.
The tapestry crumbles the moment he’s gone, its magic spent. It’ll be no more than a pile of ashes, now.
Turning back to the others, I see them watching me with clear terror in their eyes.
Captain whines, his tail between his legs.
I remember my own overwhelmed senses the first time I walked through the thread-world and know they must be feeling the same thing.
Even Sylvie, for all her bravado, looks afraid.
“It’s all right,” I say, my voice warped and distant in my ears, as if sound does not operate by the same rules here as in the real world.
“Where are we?” breathes Mrs. MacDougal.
“The world is a tapestry woven by the Fates,” I tell her. “And we have crossed to the other side of it.”
“Bloody hell. Well, can you get us out again?”
“I . . .”
I look all around for the guide thread that would have led us to the ruined castle—no further out of Lachlan’s reach, in the end, but with more time to think of something else.
But the thread is gone, lost to the flow of millions around us. Nothing is familiar here; this place is always changing. One might as well search for a familiar ripple on a river’s current.
“Come on,” I urge queasily. “And whatever you do, touch nothing. These threads are forbidden to all.”
At least we are alive. At least Lachlan cannot reach us here.
But what if I never find a way out? I have only minutes before Lachlan’s debt comes due and I pay for it with my life. Will that leave Sylvie and the MacDougals to wander the wrong side of reality until they die?
“If we just keep going,” I say, “we have to find a—ugh!”
I squeeze Sylvie’s hand as a mighty splinter of pain opens through my body; I feel I am cracking in two, head to foot. The spasm lasts longer than any have before, and I hear the distant, rattling sound of my own scream echoing back to my ears.
Lachlan must be doing this, wrenching the noose he’s tied around my heart. I can feel his fury in the fire that spreads through me and know I don’t have much time left before I succumb entirely to it.
I pry my eyes open, feeling nauseated. The others are clustered around me, alarmed and at a loss. Captain pushes his nose against my arm, as if trying to spur me to my feet.
“Help me up,” I croak.
I hobble onward, shuddering and fighting to stay conscious, the pain a swirling red whirlpool sucking at my feet. All it would take is a single moment of weakness and I would tumble into it for good, sinking deeper and deeper until I am obliterated entirely.
Deliriously, I begin to think the thread-world is no true place at all, but a manifestation of the pain inside me, and that I’ve dragged all of us into the pit of my own madness. I stumble forward, onward. And all around us, all the while, the threads of the world pulse and writhe.
I gradually become aware of a hand in mine, and I look down to see a small girl, not Sylvie, holding on to me.
Her brown hair hangs in loose curls, her freckles stark against her porcelain face.
She is so familiar, from her upturned nose to her clever little fingers to the spool tucked in her pocket.
“We’re going to die in here,” she says.
I shake my head. “Have to keep moving.”
“It was always going to end this way for us. Alone, powerless, and—don’t you remember our ninth fault?—fearful. Perhaps that’s all we are. Perhaps when you unravel us down to our weft, fear is the only thread left.”
“I still have my magic.”
“No, we don’t. We couldn’t summon a thimbleful of energy now. What point is there of going onward? Even if we make it out, what good are we to anyone? We are what she said we always were: a mouse. Weak and stupid and unworthy. Magic is not for the faint of heart.”
Her words whittle away my courage. “Please stop!”
But she clings to me like a leech. “We should hide. Bury deep into these threads. Let go of the others. Let them find their own way through. We cannot help them.”
“I’m not you anymore. I stopped being you the day I left the house on Wimpole Street.”
“Wrong!” Her voice is shrill in my ear. “I’ve been your truest self ever since that day!
Every decision you made, I made for you.
I kept you alive, till you went and bungled off in your own direction.
Why didn’t you just give the branch to the faerie?
Then we would be free! I could have kept us safe! ”
“Some things are stronger than even you,” I whisper.
“What, like love? What’s the point of falling in love if you’re too dead to enjoy it?”
I lift my head and realize I haven’t moved at all since she took hold of me.
Instead I’ve sunk into the threads; they’re up to my knees now, swirling, coiling, sucking me down.
But I look at her—my eight-year-old self, small and terrified and alone—and I know her for what she is: She is the fear which controlled me all these years.
She’s been with me forever, making every choice for me, ruling me, driving me away from the small chances I’d had at happiness and love and true freedom.
You’re afraid of being afraid, Morgaine had said, seeing to the heart of me in a matter of moments.
But it wasn’t for fear that I destroyed the Dwirra branch, and it wasn’t for fear that I danced the spell of homage to open the way to Elfhame.
“It was love,” I whisper. “I love Conrad, and I love Sylvie. More than I fear death. More than the loss of magic.”
“Without magic, we are nothing!”
“No.” I shake my head. “That . . . is the lie I told myself, isn’t it?
It is the lie Lachlan exploited to control me.
But I am so much more than my magic. I am .
. .” It is Conrad’s words which weave through my thoughts, tethering me to myself, helping me to see clearly.
“I am a teacher. I am passionate and stubborn and clever. I love my students and defend those who cannot defend themselves and go toe-to-toe with injustice. With or without magic, that is who I am. Who I choose to be.”
My little specter presses her hands to her face, her eyes welling with tears. “I am afraid!”
“I know. I am too.” I take her hand and pull her close, whispering in her ear, “But we won’t let that control us anymore.”
She shudders, crying into my shoulder. I shut my eyes and hold tightly to her.
“It’s all right,” I murmur. “It’s all right.”
My heart thuds, sending spikes of pain twisting around my ribs, piercing my spine. An agonized moan slips from my throat.
“Rose? Rose!”
I blink in confusion as the tenor of my little self’s voice shifts, growing lighter. When I pull back, I find it is Sylvie in my arms, her very real and small, warm body folded into mine for shelter. Her large, misty green eyes fasten upon my face.
“Rose, are you all right?”
I grimace, pressing a fist to my splintering chest. “Help me up, Sylvie.”
Clinging to her hand, I struggle upward, pulling myself free of the threads.
Looking back, I see the MacDougals also bogged down, their eyes glazed over, their minds bending as mine had to the maddening surreality of this place.
Only Captain seems wholly unaffected; he licks Mrs. MacDougal’s hand and whines, trying to rouse her.
We have to get out of here, before I lose them entirely. I may be on my final journey, my doom already certain, but Fates damn me if I drag Sylvie and Mr. and Mrs. MacDougal down with me.
“Up!” I shout, my voice ragged and weary, but now with an iron, unyielding edge. “Get up! All of you!”
Ruthlessly I bully them until they find their feet, then I usher them onward like a collie, pushing and tugging.
As I herd them along, I look around, eyes probing the threads.
My heart wrenches itself this way and that, but the pain is so constant now that I give up on fighting it.
I let it wash over me; I accept its every bite, and still I keep moving forward.
If this is the back of the Fates’ tapestry, then these threads are connected to the real world.
The weft and warp are hidden from view, but that doesn’t mean the pattern behind them is sheer chaos.
The colors must mean something—the lighter gray could be sky, the green trees, the lavender the moors.
And the sparkling, glowing threads between them are living things: horses and rabbits, humans and faeries.
The moorwitches walked these threads. They knew how to find their way, even without tapestries and guide threads to lead them.
They vanished in one spot and appeared in another, and now I know how they did it: They navigated this place, the underside of the world.
The fae do it too; they built their haven here, Elfhame a bubble world latched on the wrong side of reality, supported and nourished by the Dwirra Tree.
I look around with more purpose now, casting about not just for some random door, but for certain signs.
And I begin to see them: a rippling mass of threads with colors reminding me of the Three Fates Bluff, grays like slate and fog, a glowing knot that must be Blackswire and its people.
I push toward a green cluster in the opposite direction.
These strands are thick and coarse and densely bound together, much the way the ancient forest is, where the now-broken stone circle stands.
Sylvie and the MacDougals follow without too much resistance; now and again one will slow and stop, eyes turning to fog, mouth slack, but I pull them until they move again.
I don’t know why my own head stays clear.
But then, I hadn’t felt the grasping madness of this place when I’d traversed it with Lachlan’s guide thread; now, perhaps, my purpose becomes my guide thread.
I find my way forward the way I always have: by seeing the patterns at work, using an instinct that’s been in my blood since I was a child, long before I ever met the silver faerie.
This is a talent all my own, a power bargained away to no one. I lean on that intuition now more than I ever have before, throwing my full hope into that instinctive part of me which can look at a complex knot and find the single thread to undo it.
“We’re getting close,” I say, though the others give no indication that they can hear or understand me.
I drag them on anyway, and my pain too, and feel the shadow of my fear creeping along in my periphery.
Fear, always with me, even when I feel my bravest. I suppose that is the nature of it, and it can only be accepted.
That’s all right. I know now that I can be afraid and still keep moving.
I can be in the worst pain a body could feel and still keep moving.
I can lose my magic to the last drop and still keep moving.
Threads grow thicker here. They cluster like vines, tickling my neck and face. They flow around me, coil over my shoulders, moving in an almost sentient manner, snakelike.
Then I reach up to brush away one persistently tickling thread—and realize it’s no thread at all, but a branch as pale and crooked as an old crone’s finger. And it’s warm.
My breath hitches; I move more quickly, my heart stretched and splintering, my strength fading even as I push through spindly branches for what seems like hours, towing my four charges along with me, feeling warm bark and papery leaves raking my skin—
To finally tumble out into the open, landing in a heap at the foot of the Dwirra Tree.