“I am stronger than you are,” said Gerald. “I took down your precious brother, didn’t I? You have no idea what I can do to you.”
He rose slowly to his feet, slivers of magic glinting through his fingers as if he was running gold coins through his hands and they were catching the light. There was a snick as Alan popped his left wrist sheath and suddenly had knives in both hands, and one of them lifted to Gerald’s throat.
Gerald laughed. “And a knife won’t stop me.”
Mae didn’t see Sin move. The first thing she saw was Sin standing pressed up against Gerald’s back and lacing her knives with Alan’s, until it looked like Gerald was wearing a sharp-edged and gleaming collar that caught moonlight and drove him to his knees, held him afraid to move.
The first thing she heard was Sin saying in Gerald’s ear, “How many knives will? Because we have a selection.”
Alan looked into Sin’s eyes and gave a small nod.
“Deal with one of us and the other one cuts your throat,” he said. He looked like a young priest, serious and well-meaning, and then he flicked his wrist casually and Gerald’s head was pushed back against Sin’s knives. “If you want to strike, be very sure you’re fast enough. Or maybe you can tell us what the hell you meant about Merris.”
“What have you done to her?” Sin demanded.
“I didn’t do a thing,” Gerald said. “It’s just one of those things that happen … that come creeping into your body like an intruder, like a mindless demon. Bone cancer. Too advanced for any of your small magics. I guess you could try having Alan’s demon cure it: His magic’s about as subtle as a battering ram, and the disease is bound up with every bone, threaded throughout every part of her body. At least when he shattered her into a thousand pieces, it would be quick.”
“No demon is going to lay a hand on her!”
“Then she’ll die slowly,” said Gerald. “You ready to lose her? Ready to lead the Market?”
When Sin spoke, it was not to Gerald.
“Is it true?”
“Yes,” Merris said distantly.
Mae couldn’t look at Merris. It was almost too much to look at Sin.
“Why,” said Sin, and her voice trembled, “why did you not tell me?”
The knives in her hands trembled too, and Alan’s voice lashed out in a command. “Hold fast!”
“Don’t you dare give me orders, you filthy traitor,” Sin snarled, her dark eyes narrowing. Her knives did not tremble again.
There was something rising in Gerald, like the wind rising as it came in from the sea and sent chills rushing down Mae’s neck.
Toby began to cry, a long, thin, despairing sound. Mae rocked him and pleaded with him quietly, desperately afraid that he was going to distract Sin at exactly the wrong moment.
There were flashes of magic running through all of Gerald’s skin now, not just his hands: like veins of gold in rock, like the sun’s rays painted faint across the sky.
“Listen to me, Merris,” said Gerald, turning his face to her as magic’s shining fingers stroked up his jaw. “You don’t have to die. I can save you.”
“Can you?” asked Merris, her voice very calm. “And what would you want in return?”
There were sparks of golden magic bursting from Gerald’s lips. The words kept spilling out too.
“A truce. The Market isn’t getting anywhere fighting magicians. Don’t pretend that the good fight is what you care about either. The Goblin Market is a business, and I have no quarrel with that. Stop selling talismans to tourists, stop taking off their marks, and I’ll make it worth your while: There could be magic in your market that you don’t dream of now. All I want is to remove a nuisance from my life.”
“And all I want is to remove some of your important appendages,” Sin panted. “Is that wrong?”
She and Alan were both breathing hard, their knives taking on some of Gerald’s luminescence and apparently trying to bend backward in their hands. Gerald made a single gesture, palm up, and for a moment the very air around him was flooded with gold. The knives flew out of their hands. Sin and Alan were both knocked onto their backs.
The child in Mae’s arms screamed. Merris Cromwell moved forward to meet Gerald.
“Think it over,” Gerald told her, smiling. “You know where to find me.”
Sin was on her feet already, dancer-swift. She paused as she passed Alan and then gave him her hand. He took it, gritted his teeth, and hauled himself up with her help. Mae saw his shoulders set and his refusal to flinch.
They fell on Gerald like wolves, bringing him down at Merris’s feet. Gerald struck out with a fistful of magic, and Alan made a hoarse sound. Sin put a knee in Gerald’s stomach and leaned down hard, her knife pointed at his throat. Her robe was red ribbons attached to her neck and wrist, streaming out like blood-colored banners. Beneath was a white shift, streaked with blood and dirt, rising and falling fast as she panted out, “I’m tired of you,” and brought the knife down for what Mae recognized as a killing blow.
Gerald threw magic at her chest, and Sin fell back with a scorched smell in the air. Mae started forward.
“Mae, no,” Sin yelled. “Toby—”
Mae halted her charge and hung on to the howling child hard to stop herself from just putting him down and running in anyhow.
Gerald was on his feet again. So was Alan, a knife in hand and then in Gerald’s shoulder.
“He’s mine, Ryves,” Sin grated, staggering up.
Alan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m willing to share.”
“I didn’t want to have to do this,” Gerald told them quietly.
The cold note in his voice had Mae turning from him even as he lifted his hand. She started running away with her back to him, shielding the baby.
Something hit Mae from behind. She went tumbling to the ground, trying to guard Toby, and found Sin on top of her with her hair come loose and streaming around Mae’s face.
“Shh, sweetheart, my darling, it’s okay,” said Sin, and Toby unclenched his fat, clinging fists from Mae’s shirt and turned between them, bawling and snotty, to grab at Sin. Sin detached herself from Mae, sitting on the ground with her arms around her brother.
Better her than me, Mae thought, and clambered to her feet to see what was happening.
Alan had another knife in hand, driving in toward Gerald’s gut. Gerald sent a bolt of magic from his fingertips to Alan’s bad leg, and Alan gave a low scream and hit the ground.
Sin swore, shoved Toby at Mae—oh, not again—and ran back to them. Mae followed her even as Toby’s wailing started up again in her ear.
Merris Cromwell had a large ceremonial knife in her hand. Mae slackened her pace a fraction, relieved, and then saw Merris step back, lowering the knife.
Gerald said one last thing to Merris that Mae could not catch, and turned and ran.
Alan seized up one of his throwing knives from where it lay on the grass.
Merris shouted, “Don’t kill him!”
Alan threw and missed. Gerald disappeared over the crest of the hill. Sin came flying back to where Alan stood, seized him by the arm, and shouted up into his face, “Why didn’t you get him?”
“Merris said not to kill him,” Alan snapped. “Throwing knives only have so much range, and guns don’t work, so—”
“So why didn’t you run after him?” Sin demanded, every inch the princess of the Goblin Market.
Alan’s voice in response was a low snarl. “And how do you suggest I do that?”
Mae’s step slowed. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to see Alan’s face as it looked right now, white and somehow wiped clean, caught in a moment of pure, furious despair.
“I—” Sin said, and stopped. She let her hand fall from Alan’s arm.
“Don’t worry, Cynthia,” said Alan, looking down at her. “I take it as a compliment, really. It’s the first time you’ve ever forgotten for a moment about my leg.”
He didn’t sound as if he was taking it
as a compliment. He sounded tired and bitter.
Mae reached them, and she smiled at Alan a little desperately. He transferred his attention to her entirely, smiling back, and Sin turned away and snatched Toby out of Mae’s arms as she went.
The absence of the baby was an enormous relief. Mae’s face must have made that very clear, because Alan actually looked amused.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “This is just how you pictured the night going.”
With Gerald gone, the alliance against the magician was lost. Sin was at Merris’s side, Toby cradled to her chest. Merris and Sin were staring at Alan, both of them dark and dignified for a moment, looking alike even though they looked nothing alike. In the space between them and Alan, the grass was stained with blood.
“There’s nothing else I can do?” Alan asked.
Merris said, “You’ve done enough.”
They drove back from Cornwall with the sun rising slowly in a cloud-pale dawn sky, the roads gray and empty before them. Mae was so tired she kept finding herself napping with her face against the window of the car door, and she had no idea how Alan was managing to drive.
In between the bursts of power napping, she tried to stay awake and keep Alan company. She was too tired to be at all tactful.
“So how come you and Sin hate each other?” she asked as Alan turned the car left at Alphington Junction.
Alan gave a soft, startled laugh, hands light on the wheel. He didn’t look tired, but the lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper than they should have been. “We don’t hate each other,” he said. “We’re just too different. If the Goblin Market was one of the American high schools you see in the movies, she’d be the head cheerleader and I’d be the captain of the chess club.”
“Good at chess, are you?” Mae asked.
“Not bad,” said Alan. “You play?”
“Oh, every now and then.”
“We should have a game sometime,” said Alan, his voice so mild the dark thought occurred to Mae that sometime soon she might get beaten at chess, something that hadn’t happened since she was eight years old.
“We should,” she agreed. “Seemed a bit worse than the eternal rivalry of the chess club and the cheerleaders, though.”
“Well,” said Alan, “dancers don’t like seeing people even stumble. I get it, I do: Stella—Sin’s mother—I saw her fall. I’ve seen a lot of dancers fall. I know why Cynthia reacts the way she does to me. She can’t help it. But I can’t help it either. When a girl shudders every time I walk by, it doesn’t make me particularly well disposed toward her.” Alan shrugged, eyes still on the road. “Some people are just destined never to get on. I don’t hate her. I just don’t like her. It’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t imagine Sin gets that a lot,” Mae commented.
“What?”
“Boys not liking her,” said Mae. “She’s kind of amazing. And beautiful.”
She spoke almost absently, forehead pressed against the glass as she tried hard not to sleep. There was morning mist obscuring the fields on either side of the road, so dense and white it looked like there were mutant sheep lurking on all sides.
It was possible she was overtired.
“You’re just as beautiful as she is,” said Alan. That was a flat-out lie, like so much of what Alan said. Like so much of what Alan said, it sounded true. “And you read,” he added.
“Uh, hot,” said Mae, feeling quite a bit more awake.
“Well,” said Alan, faint color in his cheeks, “I think so.”
She wasn’t the only one in the car feeling tense. There was a slight defensive posture to his shoulders now, as if admitting any sort of honest emotion, even something as simple as liking girls who read, was bound to get him hurt.
Mae remembered Nick, obviously desperate to leave the moment Alan told him how he felt. She could see how lying might make Alan feel more comfortable.
She made the decision to defuse this conversation, since they were stuck in the car together for the next three-quarters of an hour. She did not want to be forced to leap out into the morning and face the mutant sheep if things got awkward.
“I’d rather be amazing than beautiful.”
“I think you are,” Alan began, a warm flush spreading along the tops of his cheekbones, and Mae was struck and saddened all at once by how different he was now than he had been with Liannan.
She had to wonder whether it was just that he had a crush on her, or if he was simply more comfortable with demons.
“You wait,” she told him. “You have no idea of how awesome I can be. Next time someone else is holding the baby.”
Alan laughed. “You did look a little…” He waved one hand expressively above the steering wheel. “As if someone had given you a sack of potatoes that might explode.”
“‘What a way with words you have, Alan Ryves,’ our heroine said with deep bitterness. You had the easy job: All you had to do was throw knives and menace a magician.”
“I like to think of myself as throwing knives with deadly precision,” Alan told her, a laugh still caught in his voice. “And I was hardly menacing him.”
“C’mon, you and Sin totally had him for a minute there. Two minutes, even.”
“I wish we had,” Alan said, serious again. “He could have killed us both anytime he liked. He didn’t. He wanted to say his piece, and he said it, and then he left. What we did was irrelevant. Well—we might have annoyed him a bit.”
“I imagine so,” Mae said dryly. “Since you stabbed him twice.”
“Yeah,” said Alan in a soft voice, eyes on the misty road ahead. “That made me think he may have come in good faith.”
“So when he asked Merris to let him kill a lot of people, he really meant it?”
“Well, yes,” Alan said calmly. “And when he asked me to help strip Nick’s powers. He might mean to keep his end of the bargain.”
Mae stared. “That’s a pretty big chance to take!”
“I know.”
There was no sound for a while but the car jolting along the road toward morning. There seemed to be very little Mae could say, aside from the one thing she was afraid to voice.
She wasn’t a coward. She said it anyway.
“Alan. You’re not actually considering it, are you?”
Alan said nothing. He said nothing for so long that Mae stopped waiting for him to speak.
She leaned her head back against the car window, vision blurring between the brightness lent to the world by fever fruit and her own exhaustion. There was a cold place somewhere under her ribs, but she told herself Alan was tired too. He didn’t mean it.
Alan’s voice was so low and measured, almost musical, that it was like a lullaby. Then what he was actually saying began to seep through the mist enveloping her mind.
“Even if it all worked out, if Nick obeys all the stupid human rules I want him to follow, someday I’ll die. And he won’t. He could keep the body alive forever or do without one. And he could get lonely and invite his demon friends in out of the cold. He could lose every word he ever learned. He’s lived a thousand different lives and forgotten them. He could forget this one. There are so many ways for something to go wrong that in the end one of them will. A lot of people will die. And it will be my fault.”
Mae was awake now. Chill morning air was filtering in from the outside even through the closed car window, slipping slivers of cold down her neck.
“I was the one who put my brother ahead of the whole world,” Alan said softly. His voice was still beautiful, even though it was so bleak. “I had no right to make that decision. I wasn’t acting in some sort of thoughtless desperation. I thought. I chose. Two innocent people are dead already, and I had absolutely no right!”
“You had your reasons.”
Mae remembered the magicians of the Obsidian Circle and that terrible man, Arthur, gathered around the circle where Nick had stood trapped and snarling, like witches around a cauldron with a child in it. Someone Alan
loved had been in danger. Mae had done something similar with the magician she’d killed for Jamie. She’d wanted to kill someone for him, she’d planned it, and she’d seized the chance when she had it, and then she had discovered she could not move on. Decisions like that cast long shadows; darkened your whole future, as far as you could see.
She knew how it lingered in memory, the blood on your hands.
“No reason could be good enough,” said Alan, his voice breaking on the words.
They drove through the mist in silence.
When they pulled up outside Alan and Nick’s house, Mae thought for a moment that somebody had left a light on.
Mae hadn’t brought her house key, and Jamie was in no mood to let her in if she threw pebbles at his window. What Annabel would say if Mae rang the doorbell at half past five in the morning didn’t bear thinking about, so Alan had volunteered his bed.
“I will be taking the sofa,” Mae said mid-yawn. Alan reached over and undid her seat belt, and she batted at him feebly, yawning again. “I am prepared to fight you for it.”
That was when Alan leaned forward, squinting through the windshield. Mae’s eyes followed his line of vision, and they both noticed the light.
Nobody had accidentally left the lights on, Mae realized after a moment of staring. The lamp set in the window was shining with a peculiar brightness, sending out brilliant yellow rays like searchlights. Its glow was cut into four sections by black iron.
“That’s a—” Alan began.
“Beacon lamp,” Mae finished.
“Lights the path back you have to follow,” Alan said, as if he was quoting. “Calls your wanderer home.” He shook his head, mouth curving a little, and then swung out of the car, hand on the door helping him do it smoothly. “Nick had a few objections to me going to the Goblin Market,” he said as he came around to her side.
Mae foiled his chivalrous intentions by opening her door herself and leaping out. Alan shrugged, smiled at her, and went to the door, sorting his keys and still talking, very casual, head bent over the keys as if he thought he could possibly hide how pleased he was.
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