But I was here for another reason as well, a secret so closely kept within my heart that I had not even known it myself, not until I felt it squeezed and excised from my brain by that strange, stony force: I was here because of my mother. By traveling to Faerie, I was doing what she had always wanted to do but had never managed in her own lifetime. In coming here, I could both love her and become her. It was why I had done so many things, so obvious now: to bring my mother back to life by building on her inventions, her engineering. Did I even want those things?
But before I had time to finish asking myself that question, to see clearly the last bit of my soul that the great pressure had laid bare, the ordeal was over. Space opened up around me, and I could breathe again.
I gasped as an infant must gasp when it is born. I knew the rock had nearly squeezed me to death, and I knew as well that if the force that had searched my mind had found something . . . distasteful to it there, I would indeed have died. My body hurt too much for me to feel real gratitude at my survival, but with each inhalation relief flooded through me.
After the complete darkness inside the rock, the light in this new place glared and fizzed angrily. My eyes burned as I waited for my vision to adjust.
“Fin? Nick?” I heard Caro say behind me. “Are you all right?”
I coughed several times before I felt able to reply; I was amazed that Caro could speak in anything more than a rasp. “Fine,” I croaked eventually, although it was just barely on the edge of true. Fin kept coughing far longer than I did, but at last he was able to make a vaguely affirmative wheeze.
By then my eyes had adjusted, although they still ached. I looked down at my hands; the pressure of the rock had broken the rope that bound me. Each of my fingernails was cracked through, and each crack was edged with blood. I wiped my eyes and found blood there, too.
I saw that we were in a kind of storeroom, with stacks of muslin bags lining the wall. Our captors had kindly paused while the three of us regained our breath, and they were watching us with cautious analysis.
“I thought the rock might take you,” the leader said, the one who’d seized me. Fe nodded at Fin. “Especially you.”
Bruises and purplish, broken blood vessels mottled Fin’s beautiful face, and I saw raw fear in his eyes. I wondered what the force in the rock had found inside his mind. He coughed again, still incapable of speech, his head bowed.
“Right,” the Fey said. “You’ll come with us, Heir of Esting.” Two soldiers took Fin’s arms and began to lead him away.
I tried to lunge forward, but the pain in my limbs made me stumble. “Wait!” I said. “Don’t take him away from us, please. You must—you must know he was telling the truth now. We all were.”
The Fey snorted. “The rock may have spit you out, but that doesn’t mean I trust you.”
Fin raised his head with obvious effort. “That stone,” he whispered in a voice like a ghost’s, “it tore open my heart, it found all my—” A coughing fit seized him, and it was another minute before he could speak again. “You must know I’ll die to save this place if I need to.”
I remembered the feeling I’d gotten in the jungle, the sudden certainty that Faerie had nothing to do with me, that it wasn’t waiting for me to come explore it, that it didn’t care about me at all.
“Plenty of people have died for this place,” the leader said icily, “every one of them because of Esting. One death more or less won’t make any difference.”
Fin, still panting and coughing, glared at the Fey.
The leader nodded at two other soldiers. “I’ll deal with this one,” fe said, then fe jerked fer head toward us. “Take them down.”
I cried out in tandem with Caro as Fin was pulled away from us, vanishing down the stone tunnel with the soldiers who held him. The other soldiers moved behind us. Something heavy cracked against the back of my head, and then I felt nothing.
✷
The floor was cold and damp. My first thought was that I must be far underground. I remembered my mother’s workshop in the cellar of Lampton Manor, and I felt sick with miserable longing. The cool, slick stone met my burned skin like a blessing, and all I wanted was to keep my face pressed against it.
But I remembered Fin and Caro, and I forced myself to sit up.
Caro was leaning against the damp, dark blue wall nearby, watching me worriedly. She took my hand, avoiding the burns as best she could, and grimaced when she saw my fingernails.
“Did the rock do that to you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, and was relieved to find that I had my voice back. Now that I was seated and starting to really feel all the different pains again, it hurt too much even to nod.
“I knew there was more to it than the threshold spells at the Night Market,” she said, “but it seems the passage was much harder on you and Fin. I wonder why.”
“Maybe they weren’t as suspicious of you,” I said.
“No.” Caro frowned. “I still felt them, it, picking me apart—tearing my heart open, as Fin said. But there were . . . what it found wasn’t frightening or . . . or complicated.” She shook her head. “I hadn’t known it myself, the limits and dimensions of everything I want. Loving Fin, loving you, hoping we all get through this alive. Missing Bex and my family back home, and one or two secret hopes of my own.” Caro touched her heart with the hand that wasn’t holding mine. “That’s all the desire that’s in me, I guess. At least right now.”
I took in as deep a breath as my injured lungs would allow. “I know what you mean. I felt it sorting through everything I wanted too. It found some things I didn’t even know were there myself.” I looked down at my bloody fingertips. “I think I’m lucky . . . I think I’m lucky I survived it.”
Caro looked at me searchingly. “What didn’t you know, Nick?”
I tried to answer, but instead I started to cry.
I felt Caro touch the corners of my eyes, trying to gather up the salt tears before they could sting my burns. I looked up at her, and her face was so open, so kind and lovely, unmarked by the stone’s test in the way Fin’s and my own faces were, so much the Caro I had always known.
I leaned forward, slowly, full of pain, and I touched my lips to hers.
We’d had whole conversations in one look so often, and it was the same in that one kiss. We talked about home, and love, and friendship; how good it was that here at the end of the world, captured and hidden underground while we waited to meet who knew what fate, at least we had each other. At least we had someone we loved.
The kiss ended as quietly and gently as it had begun. Caro and I leaned against each other and the cold stone wall. I closed my eyes, and we fell asleep huddled together in the cell.
Some hours later, the door opened. A Fey I hadn’t seen before walked in and closed it quickly behind fer. Fe was tall and broad-shouldered, and far more blue freckles covered the left side of fer face than the right. Fe wore a blue bandanna just like the soldiers had, but the rest of fer clothes were all loosely draped white linen. I recognized them, from my reading, as healer’s robes.
I didn’t study fer face or clothes for long, though, because what fe carried was far more important. Fe had brought a whole basin of cool water for us, as well as threadbare but clean-looking cloths for washing and a pair of equally threadbare blue shift dresses. Fe set down the basin and took a small glass jar out of fer pocket. The unmistakable earthy, astringent smell of cap-o’-rushes filled the room.
I had been a little afraid of this new Fey’s officious manner at first, but as soon as fe offered me the salve for my burns, I would have done anything fe asked.
“Did you look after Fin, too—a dark young man with curly hair?” Caro asked.
The Fey pressed fer lips together, and I remembered what Mr. Candery had told me about Fey healers so long ago: that they didn’t speak unless absolutely necessary, the better to focus their intentions and their powers on their medicine.
The healer nodded at Caro.
>
“Is he all right?” I asked.
Fe turned to me, and I saw boundless kindness, boundless sympathy, in fer eyes; that was perhaps more healing than the salve.
Fe nodded again, and I could have collapsed with relief.
After the healer saw to our injuries, fe gave us a spongy white fruit to eat, and I was so focused on it in my hunger that I barely noticed as we were led out of the cell and down another long tunnel, around so many turns and corners and byways that I wouldn’t have been able to keep them straight in my mind even if I had been paying attention.
At last we arrived in a small, spare room equipped with a desk facing two chairs. Caro and I sank into them gladly, still chewing the rinds of our fruits. I was too tired to be anything but docile, and that was what frightened me the most.
✷
I knew Mr. Candery as soon as he walked through the door. With a burst of strength I flung myself forward, pressed my face against his tall shoulder, and wrapped my arms around him.
I’d missed him every day since I was twelve years old.
But I quickly realized how different he was from the delicately genteel, suit-clad housekeeper I remembered. His arms around me were wiry and hard, and he’d grown tougher and leaner about the shoulders too. I could feel the harshly raised ridge of a scar along his back where I hugged him, even through his shirt.
“Hello, Nicolette,” he murmured into my hair. His voice was both the same and different; as gentle and erudite as the voice I remembered, but also lower and rougher, as if it too bore scars.
He stood there for a long time, letting me hug him and hugging me back. Eventually he pulled away to look at my face. His blue-flecked gray eyes showed such a strange, conflicting mix of emotions that I couldn’t tear my own gaze from them, could only let him examine me and wait until he came to his conclusion.
“I am so glad to see you safe,” he said at last in his new, scarred voice. But there was sadness in his eyes, and anger too.
The shadows of those emotions on his face, a face I hadn’t seen in so long and yet remembered with such perfect clarity—more so than even my mother’s—felt like the last small, unbearable burden on an already unbearable day. It was all I could do to keep my chin from trembling as I smiled at him or my voice from breaking as I said, “You too, Mr. Candery.” I kept watching that sadness and anger, wondering which would win out.
I was so focused on him that I didn’t notice Caro’s building anger, not until it exploded.
“You’re not glad to see her safe!” she cried. “Your invitation was a trap all along! That storm, the ship, all of the crew . . .” Her voice hitched. “We’re lucky any of us lived.” She took a calming breath. “How dare you act as if you love her when you sent her to her death?”
Mr. Candery flinched. He pulled away from me, his hands brushing reluctantly along my arms as he let me go.
“If you believe nothing else,” he said softly, “you must believe—you must—that the storm was not our doing. I swear it.”
Caro’s anger had infected me. “Would you swear on my mother’s grave?” I asked, just to hurt him. He’d loved my mother so.
He looked away, and something, some last hope, started to crumble inside of me.
“I’ll swear on anything you like, Nicolette, that I have never meant you or your friends any harm,” he said quietly. I didn’t know what to believe. If the Fey hadn’t sent that storm, who had? I knew beyond a doubt that it was no natural tempest.
A guard standing in the doorway conspicuously cleared fer throat.
Mr. Candery gave a short, curt nod. “Right,” he said, the roughness, the soldier, coming back into his voice. “I know you won’t like this, but I have to take you somewhere, and I can’t let you see where we’re going. I was about to say you needed to trust me, but . . .” He sighed. “I realize that I can’t ask that of you.”
“But we have to go with you, trusting or not,” Caro said. “There’s hardly a choice.”
Mr. Candery straightened his shoulders, and he nodded slowly. The guard tied my hands behind my back again, and my old housekeeper brought a blindfold to my eyes.
✷
We were led at a slow walk for some minutes and then helped up onto a hard, flat bench, and I felt us rolling forward, being jostled as if we were in a carriage on an uneven road. In spite of my trepidation, I was still so exhausted that I fell asleep several times.
I don’t know what I expected to see when my blindfold was finally removed, but it wasn’t the unassuming door in front of me. We were standing in a pleasant-looking street with wooden doors set into connected buildings built from yellowish stone. It was . . . charming. Cheerful. The sun was shining, and the pain of my burns had subsided enough that I could almost enjoy its warmth.
Some notation was written across the door, a few symbols that I thought might be numbers; I’d never learned Fey writing. All the books on the language had been burned long ago.
Mr. Candery made a quick gesture, and the silent Fey guard turned Caro and me gently but forcibly around. I saw a sunny, well-manicured courtyard. There were high walls surrounding us, to be sure, but this was hardly the dour barracks I’d imagined.
After a few long moments, I heard a loud ratcheting sound; the guard turned us back toward the now-open door, and we followed Mr. Candery into a domestic little hallway. I tried unsuccessfully to guess where we might be going, to gather clues from the framed pictures on the walls, which looked like diagrams or blueprints, but my mind was worn out and my thoughts scattered.
Only a few minutes passed before Mr. Candery stopped in front of another door. “Now,” he said, bending down a little bit to speak to me, as if I were still a young girl and he my teacher and guardian, “this is where we must leave you, Miss Lampton.”
The formal way he spoke my name, as if he were my housekeeper again, jarred me. Caro reacted before I did, stepping protectively in front of me.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “You’ve taken one of my friends away already, and I won’t let you take the other. I won’t let you separate us.” This was Palace Manager Caro with all the authority in the world in her voice; I wouldn’t have dared to argue with her myself.
Mr. Candery did indeed look taken aback, and in fact it was the guard who protested. “You are a prisoner of war,” fe said coldly. “You will each go, or stay, wherever we so decide.”
Caro scowled, the guard frowned back, and their expressions were so similar that my exhausted brain found it funny rather than frightening.
Mr. Candery stepped between them, and I saw the soldier in him again. “These girls are no longer prisoners,” he said. “It’s been proven they mean no harm, and now they are under my care.”
The guard saluted automatically and looked down at the floor.
“Mr. Candery,” I said, “I must stay with Caro, if there’s any way in the world that I can.” I took a deep breath, heartened by the sympathy I saw in his face. “And we must return to Fin as soon as possible. Please, you must understand that.”
Mr. Candery looked at Caro thoughtfully, at the way she still stood in front of me as if I were some treasure to be fiercely guarded. “How much do you trust this lady, my dear?” he asked, holding up one long finger when I began to give an angry retort. “Please, Nicolette. A great secret lies before you in this room, one that none but your own family should know.”
I remembered suddenly another time I’d stood in a hall by a doorway with a mystery before me; I had listened to Mr. Candery and my mother talk about the future in despairing tones. I think that was when I first began to wonder about something that took me years to really acknowledge, a hope that I had never confronted in myself until the rock’s pressure had nearly wrung it out of me.
I’d always believed my blue eyes came from my father; Mother had told me they did. Now I looked at Mr. Candery, standing on the threshold of some secret he swore only my family should be privy to, and I understood what the secret in his own b
lue-flecked eyes had been.
Mr. Candery had loved my mother so.
I started to shake, whether with hope or fear, I didn’t know. I looked down at my own hands as if suddenly I would see traces of blue freckles.
Instead I saw Caro’s hand clutch mine.
“She is my family,” I said, looking back up at Mr. Candery. “Any secret of mine is safe in her keeping.”
It took less time than I thought it would for him to nod and step back. “All right, Nicolette. Perhaps it’s best, after all.”
He knocked thrice on the door in quick succession. It opened with another ratcheting sound. He gave a short, brusque bow to whomever waited for us there.
I took a cautious step inside, and Caro followed me.
The room was mostly dark. The only light came from a large brick fireplace, once again surprisingly domestic—Estinger domestic—in its design.
There were a few spindly chairs around the fireplace, and in one of them a woman was sitting. She wore a slightly old-fashioned but distinctly Estinger style of dress made of pale muslin. A faint sinnum smell—ombrossus?—reached my nose.
A clockwork butterfly flitted out of a corner and alighted on my wrist. I recognized it with a start as one of my own buzzers. My heart beat faster as I watched the rest of them flock to Caro and me, landing softly and pressing against us with little purring sounds.
“What on earth are you doing here?” I whispered. I was glad to see them, but their sudden appearance scared me. What else was waiting in this room?
I heard the door close behind us, and the woman turned in her chair. The fire illuminated one side of her face.
It was a face I’d know anywhere, the first face I had ever known. The face of my mother.
IT took me the space of several seconds, all of them ticked out in the beat of a loud clock somewhere in the room, to even register the shock I felt.
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