“It . . . won’t hurt, will it?” she asks me tentatively, climbing onto the table in the examining room.
Her hair sticks up in tufts at her temple. It reminds me of when Eve was a little girl.
“Yes,” I say gently. “Yes, sweetheart, this will hurt. But it’s going to save your life, and the Firn you give today will save someone else, someday. Just like the cure you’re getting now came from the generosity of someone who was here before you.”
She scrunches her eyes shut and doesn’t make a sound as I press the large needle into her skin. “You’re doing so well, Elise,” I say as I drain as much of the Firn blood out of her veins as I can without killing her. We’ll boil the shards of Firn down to form one larger glittering stone, just like Philip and Dr. Holm once did—but we’re taking what they meant for death and turning it toward life. We catalog and store the stones, keeping cabinets filled with all different kinds of crystallized magic to sell within the magical community. Their sales pay enough to keep our clinic running, and our customers sign a contract to return the deadened Firn once it’s spent. Because that dead Firn is perhaps the most valuable thing of all, in the end—it holds our cure.
When I finish draining two vials of blood from Elise, I unlock the cabinet and select an inoculation from our stock. The injection allows us to introduce the Firn’s danger in a much weakened state. Our bodies learn how to form their own resistance, just like a vaccine. And now when the Firn tries to take hold in us, it is attacked and dismantled, instead of being left to build up and steadily crystallize in our veins.
For so long, we had to choose: our magic or our future. Doing the things that made us us—that made us feel alive, but at the cost of life itself. Now, every time we take someone’s Firn, it’s like adding a new knot to a rope that keeps growing; each person who comes in for a cure also gives us a lifeline to throw on to the next person. It’s the key that unlocks endless magic.
And it’s about as close to sewing up the rips in people as I can get.
“Thank you,” Elise says simply when I am finished. She tucks her bandaged arm into her mended cloak, staring at it in disbelief for a moment. “Thank you,” she says again, and then she ducks out into the bright sunlight.
I catalog her visit and tally the books to show Helene. Our clinic, and the work we do here, is underwritten by Helene Vestergaard. She is selling off the limestone mines—getting out from under the weight of them, and setting aside money to fund our work for years to come. Our clinic can’t give anyone back the past that was stolen. But it can help to make sure that people with magic have a future now.
I run my fingertips down the page and smile a little at the filling columns. Helene wanted to come clean and tell the public the truth about the mines. But it risked putting magical people in more danger than ever before. The confession would place a deadly target on our backs, forcing us to hide our magic or live in fear that someone might try to harm us for Firn. So we convinced her that the best choice was to keep quiet. Now no one will ever know the truth about the Danish jewels that glitter around the royals’ necks.
Not even the king himself.
“We better go,” Jakob says to me, locking away Elise’s newly collected Firn and reaching for his hat. “We’re going to be late.”
He turns the sign in our window to CLOSED. “Are work hours over now?” he asks coyly, and pulls me in close. My breath catches a little. I’ve waited all day, anticipating this. I gently touch his collar and then his lips, happiness flooding through me as he leans in. My stomach flips when he grazes a finger just behind my earlobe, and I tighten my grip around his waist. His kiss deepens in a way that makes me understand how many times he’s pictured this very moment all day too. “Come on,” I eventually whisper into the corner of his mouth, and when he gives a little groan of protest, I laugh. “We can’t miss it.”
* * *
The mountains are flowering with marguerite daisies, and the Vestergaard home rises up behind a lake that glints like a slab of polished azurite. The house has been restored from the massive damage it sustained during the battle with Philip and his men. The windows are new and sparkling in the sunshine. White camellias spill out over their ledges.
There is nothing on the façade that hints at what happened that night. The evidence disappeared as completely as the blizzard melting away. Jakob was the one who ventured out into the early morning snow, once Philip was dead and the rest of the miners subdued. Jakob spread urgent word through Brock’s network of servants until we found a connection to a well-placed policeman. A senior officer—a man with a young son who can turn milk to butter without the use of a churn. He arrived at the Vestergaards’ with a small but heavily armed group to collect the surviving miners and Malthe only a few hours later.
I’m not sure what happened to them, but the officer assured us that the secret will be safe.
The official word is that the others died in the blizzard.
Now we join several ink-black carriages to park in a line in front of the Vestergaard home. Brock stands at the door to escort guests inside, his hair slicked back with oil. He’s dressed in tails. He pulls us aside and knits a fragrant string of white gardenias around my wrist and then stuffs a matching boutonniere into Jakob’s pocket. He smirks at us. “If you’re late,” he says, pushing us inside, “Nina will turn you into hats.”
Jakob and I part to change, and I hurry up the stairs to the room I still share with Liljan. Any of us could leave the Vestergaards for other employment now, and yet none of us have. I’ve found the family I always yearned for and I’m not going to give that up just yet. But the scars left from that terrible night are harder to hide on the inside of the house. A walk through the back gardens shows stone markers carved for Declan, Rae, and Ivy. Nina limps and uses a cane. Eve’s arm has a long, thick pink scar that sometimes she bears proudly and sometimes she asks Liljan to hide. Lara’s head injury healed, but she often searches for her words. Some days I catch Helene staring off into space, standing alone in front of the portrait of her late husband.
I pause at the mirror now, fastening my gown. On the days when I come downstairs and find Dorit crying as she makes oatmeal—or when I wake and realize that it’s getting harder to remember what my father and Ingrid looked like—I can feel the sweet temptation rising, to let hatred and bitterness settle within me just a little bit. Every day, in big ways and small ones, the people in this house get up and make the choice to forgive all over again.
And I will too. I wear a small piece of my own Firn on a chain. It reminds me that magic and love are things I used to fear—things that build up little by little over time, creating something beautiful in the deepest parts of me. But the wrong things can build up too, if I let them.
The Firn on my chain is a lovely glittering violet, always asking with a quiet insistence: What will I look like on the inside at the end of my life?
* * *
I rush through the house before the performance starts. The kitchen is alive with warm smells of fresh pastry, of simmering braises and honey and cakes and platters of flowers and berries from Brock’s garden. It is a magic house even more than before, unlocked from the threat of the Firn.
I join the rest of the guests in the ballroom just in time. Jakob looks jaw-dropping in his black tuxedo, and when he sees me, he swallows hard and fidgets tellingly with his cuff links. For the first time, I made a new dress for me with magic and without any fear. It fits every curve, as though bright blue satin is being poured around me from a pitcher.
Flustered, I take my place in the front row next to Liljan. She squeezes my hand between the seats. Her scar is a silver thread across her face.
Beside me, with his curly hair and shadowed cheeks and a top hat resting in his long fingers, is Hans Christian Andersen. I startle at the sight of him, so close to me in the flesh, and manage to stutter out a greeting. An amused smile quirks his lips. Maybe someday, I’ll have the courage to tell him how definitively his stories have w
oven into my own.
A hush falls over the small, intimate crowd when the violinist begins to play.
Eve is finally getting to perform.
Because Helene isn’t interested in getting Eve into the Royal Danish Ballet anymore. Helene is starting her own ballet school and planning a series of special shows, with tickets you can’t buy. The performances are by invitation only, where there are whispers of magic and wonder. A new wave overtaking ballet. This is the first show—a preview, to get influential people talking. Next, Helene and Eve will travel throughout Europe and Russia and the West Indies, studying ballet, holding auditions. Learning more about where they came from, and—I heard Helene say in a lowered voice to Dorit—perhaps even where the sugar is coming from. “Philip was wrong about almost everything,” she said quietly, and I leaned into the shadows to listen closer. “But people can get almost everything wrong and still get one or two things right.” So she and Eve are picking out the little glints of what might be truth. Sifting through the rest of it and starting somewhere.
When they return, we’ll morph the east wing of the house into a dormitory and ballet school for Helene to run. Any orphans who show promise as dancers are being given first preference.
We will offer them a place to live, here with us.
And though we aren’t certain how much magic exists outside Denmark, the salons have one final purpose. The whispers of magic should act like a beacon of light, drawing out those people with hidden magic themselves. All it takes is one person in each city to begin spreading word of a cure through their own underground networks. And if there is need for a cure in other countries, we will be ready with it.
The curtain rises in front of us. Eve is center stage, standing in the shadows of an arching tree bough. At the moment the song begins, leaves and blossoms fall from the branches and twirl around her still, poised figure.
Eve lifts to her toes beneath the tree, and the green leaves turn russet and orange and are flaked with gold as they swirl to the stage. The violin music is so deep and rich it could be poured into cups like coffee.
Mr. Andersen leans slightly forward.
Eve is a lightning rod, drawing every eye in the room to herself. She dances as though she is lit with fire on the inside, and seeing her also causes something to light within me. There are gasps when the snow begins to fall from the rafters and the audience realizes that the snowflakes aren’t made of paper but are cold and soft. The room suddenly fills with the scent of fir trees, as though we have wandered into a deep forest, and a line of luminaries springs to light at the very moment Eve piqué turns past them.
Eve doesn’t look like the dancers I saw months ago on the royal stage. She is drawing into something deeper, more desperate, surging with its power behind her jetés. There are flowers blooming and vines curling around her, fireflies rising in sparks above her head—so much beauty, without a single jewel in sight. As the music builds to a climax, she begins spinning like a top set off by a child’s fingers—an impossible number of turns, a tangle of arms and legs and a skirt flecked with bright glass, refracting a thousand points of light.
And then when she leaps into the air, I think of all the hours of pain and frustration and sacrifice that only she knows, the cost in her life that went into making this fleeting moment of beauty for the rest of us.
It might not be as dramatic as what Ingrid did for me. But what is love if not life, siphoned out and given away and spent freely for others each day?
Eve lands the leap, the one I saw her miss and hit the floor of the greenhouse in her rehearsals for the king. But this time, she doesn’t waver. She nails the jump cleanly. She raises her head, her chest heaving, and she searches the crowd for me. When our eyes meet, my pride for her does the same thing that my hurt for her does: slices through me to a different place, magnified on her behalf.
I feel the goose bumps rise on my skin, the pleasurable shiver.
She did it. That glorious zing.
Magic.
Hans Christian Andersen leans forward even more next to me, his eyes lit. “Life,” he whispers. “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”
I know that after tonight, Eve will go on from here. She will leave Denmark to travel with Helene, maybe for months at a time. She will continue to change, and improve, and, soon enough, grow up. But she will always come back.
And I will be here, waiting. Listening for the front door to finally open—for the voice I love most to call out, “Marit! Marit, I’m home!”
She is. More than anyone else, she is.
With a plum in my hands, I will run to her.
THE END
Acknowledgments
To Greg, James, and Cecilia: This book was born from that special year we spent in California. I’ll always cherish that time with you, roaming the San Francisco Botanical Garden, marveling at the wonders of the Academy of Sciences, and watching The Nutcracker at the SF Ballet. Oh, how I love you.
To my parents, Kevin and Sarah Bain: There will never be enough words to say thank you, or how much of a blessing you are. Thank you to Hannah Bain, Andrew and Angie Bain, Donald and Jean Korb, Ralph and Doris Bain, and the Bain, Goldman, and Shane families.
Thank you to Mark and Barbara Murphy and Janlyn Murphy. Your support and love continue to mean the absolute world to me.
To Peter Knapp: Thank you for believing in me, for cupcakes and pep talks and crisp fall days, and for helping make my dreams come true.
To Nicole Sclama: Thank you for your enthusiasm and for bringing this book to life. I am forever grateful to work with you and the entire hardworking team at HMH Books for Young Readers: Celeste Knudsen, Shannon Luders-Manuel, Michelle Triant, Sammy Brown, Taylor McBroom, Mary Magrisso, Susan Buckheit, and Anna Dobbin.
To Sarah Odedina, Helen Crawford-White, and everyone at Pushkin Press: You are an absolute dream to work with, and I’m so grateful and blessed that I’ve gotten to do it twice.
Thank you to the many people who made California feel like home: Melissa Freeman, the Balsitis family, Carolyne Conner and the Tonella family, Lianne Achilles, Yomei Kajita, Alisa Hosaka, James Minahan, Katie Allen Nelson, Stephanie Garber, Misa Sugiura, Tara Goedjen, Andrew Shvarts, Lucy Keating, and all the other friends, authors, readers, bloggers, booksellers, and amazing people that make up the book community in California.
Thank you to my author friends for your encouragement, invaluable insight, and friendship on this journey: Kayla Olson, Anna Priemaza, Bree Barton, Gita Trelease, Corrie Wang, Lindsay Cummings, Nadine Brandes, and countless others from my debut group.
Thank you to Beth Nelson, Anne McKim, Addie Peyronnin, Jennifer Carter, Chris Iafolla, Anna Tuttle Delia, Sarah Hoover, Sarah Dill, Christie Pickrell, Kristen Daniels Wade, Susi Thannhuber, April Welch, Alexandra Nesbeda, Caitlin Dalton, Wendy Huang, Emily Hall, my incredible Missouri neighborhood crew, the entire Hess CG, and the Amundson family. To all my friends near and far, who have shared your lives with me in Connecticut, Massachusetts, San Francisco, Evansville, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, and now Missouri, please know that I am thinking of you as I write this. I thank you for your support and your enthusiasm over The Disappearances—for showing up at events and sending messages and for the way you make my life so incredibly full.
Thank you to the readers, bloggers, booksellers, librarians, and Bookstagrammers who have championed my books. You have deeply touched my heart.
And thank you to the true older brother, who gave His life so I could find home in Him. You are abundance, forgiveness, and hope. Romans 5:3–4. Your beauty speaks to me everywhere.
Chapter One
Gardner, Connecticut
September 27, 1942
I want something of hers.
There’s a teacup downstairs, the last one she used before she died. She didn’t finish her chicory coffee that morning, and what she left stained the porcelain in a faint ring. Her lipstick remains smudged in Red Letter Red along the rim. It’s been three weeks, a
nd I still haven’t been able to wash it away.
But I shouldn’t choose the teacup. Nothing fragile is going to survive today.
“Aila?” Cass opens my bedroom door, her white blond hair pinned up in a plait, her wide eyes darker than normal. “Your father says I can come with you to the train station, but we have to leave in five minutes.”
“I’ll be ready,” I say softly. “I would be more worried about Miles.”
She nods and disappears back into the hallway. Her footsteps fall on creaking boards, and then the house returns to its solemn hush, so quiet you can almost hear the dust settle. As if we have all already left it.
Five minutes.
I go to my parents’ room.
It’s been tidied since the last time I was here, the day of my mother’s memorial. Now the bed is made. All the flowers have been cleared away. Her vanity is free of her compacts and even the precious glass vial of Joy perfume she always displayed but hardly ever wore. I open her drawers, run my fingertips over her jewelry, but it’s all tangled and gaudy, and I want to leave it there, just as she left it. As if she could come in at any moment and clip on her big ugly earrings, as bright and jagged as suns.
I turn to the bookshelf. It, too, has been sorted, but I prefer the way it used to look, when the books were all jumbled and wedged in at odd angles, threatening to fall onto my feet.
My eye catches a large leather volume, its spine dwarfing all the others. I’ve never seen it before. I kneel down in front of it, my knees finding the threadbare place where the rug has worn almost through to the floor.
I pull out the book and flip through the pages. They whisper against my fingers, thin and delicate, like moth wings. It is Shakespeare, a collection of his plays and poems, and my mother’s handwriting is everywhere in it, littering the margins and cluttering the white gaps between sentences in different-colored ink. The pages are yellowing, as if Mother has had this book for a long time. I wonder where it’s been hiding until now.
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