“Dad, no,” Tomo begged.
“Dad, no,” Kami echoed desperately. “They’re sorcerers, Dad. And I have magic again. I have the best chance of saving him. It has to be me.”
Dad’s face went colder suddenly, black eyes sharp and dangerous. He looked to the kitchen door. Kami followed his gaze and saw the others standing there, Rusty, Angela, and Holly having joined Jared and looking relieved to see Tomo.
“Your mum told me you couldn’t be his source again,” Dad said, with a motion of his head toward Jared. “So where did you get magic, Kami? What did someone do to you?”
“No, Dad, you’ve got it wrong,” Kami said. “It’s not like that. I asked Ash to. I wanted to. I chose. And that means I can save Ten. Please, please let me go.”
Dad shut his eyes and buried his face for a second against Tomo’s hair. “Okay,” he said at last. “Okay. But I’m trusting you, Kami. Get him back safe.” He unloosed an arm from around Ten and drew Kami in to him, to them both, so Ten’s hot cheek was pressed against Kami’s forehead. Kami could see the glitter of Dad’s eyes and realized that her father was about to cry.
“Get yourself back safe,” he whispered, and then he let her go.
* * *
Morning had not come to the woods yet. Light was brimming and refracting at the edges of the wood, outlining the shapes of the trees and trimming branches with diamond points. There was no warmth on the forest floor they were racing over, nothing but cold gray shadow laid across the dead leaves, fallen boughs, and Kami’s band of friends racing through the winter wood.
Their breathing and their crashing footsteps were almost the only sounds she could hear, a tiny moving island of frantic noise in the midst of a spreading sea of silence.
Kami could feel Ash’s helpless dismay and guilt at what his mother had done in her head, from the little room in the Water Rising where her friends had left him so they could come to her. Even though it wasn’t his fault, the fact that he was there in her head was like someone touching an open wound. Even though it wasn’t his fault, she found herself almost hating him.
She knew he could sense that. She could not quite bring herself to care; she was too consumed by panic and fear and she did not have the energy to block it off from him. Kami’s vision blurred, leaves and earth nothing but darkness under her feet, and her foot slipped beneath the moss.
A hand caught hers, grasp firm. Kami looked up and saw Jared looking down at her. Angela’s shoulder supported her on the other side, giving her a moment of warmth. She did not fall. She kept running, until they were so close to the Crying Pools that Kami could see the change in the light, the trees thinning and the cool sunshine pouring into the hollow.
Then Henry Thornton blundered into her path. Kami walked right into his chest. She glanced up into eyes gone dark and wild behind his glasses and felt the frantic grip of his hands on her wrists.
“No,” he gasped at her. “Kami—oh no—”
Kami set her hands against his chest and shoved. “Out of my way.”
Henry staggered back and she was almost past him, when he grabbed her hand. His fingers bit into her skin.
“Don’t look,” he said.
“Let go!”
Jared launched himself at Henry, breaking Henry’s grip on Kami and backing Henry into a tree for good measure. Jared’s fingers twisted in Henry’s collar, almost throttling him, face very close to his. “Don’t touch her.”
Henry stared into Jared’s eyes, then turned his face away as if he could not bear to look at him. “None of you should see,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t—I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Kami took a step, not toward the space beyond the trees where the light changed, infused with the shimmering, shifting quality it gained when it hit water, but toward Henry. “To my brother?” she asked, her voice shaking with terror. “Has something happened to my brother?”
“Come on, buddy,” said Rusty. “Tell us.”
Henry did not lift his eyes from the leaves. “Lillian met us holding a child’s hand,” he said. “I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know what she intended for him. Things like sources, like the ceremony of the pools, they’re stories to me, and Lillian came with a child saying we had to risk it. He looked so frightened. They all looked frightened. I didn’t know what was happening at all, but I couldn’t do it. I went away. I meant to come and find you all.”
Kami found she couldn’t move. She looked at Henry, no urgency in the way he stood, showing no sign of alarm even with Jared’s hand at his throat. He looked exhausted past the point of fear.
She lifted a hand to stop Rusty, Angela, and Holly from going toward the pools.
“But you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t come find us, did you?”
“I made it out of the woods, and I went toward Aurimere,” Henry said. “And I saw strange things going on there. I was worried. I thought Lillian would know what to do.”
His voice shook. Kami saw him trembling under Jared’s hands and shot Jared a meaningful glance. Jared stepped away, but Henry didn’t move. He just stayed against the tree, his gaze on the ground.
“So you came back to the pools,” Kami said slowly. “But when you met us, you were going away again. You were running away.”
“I—” Henry’s voice cracked, and he stopped.
Kami’s limbs felt heavy with dread. What Henry had seen was so bad that he did not want to move and could barely even speak. She didn’t want to see it. She wanted to stay where she was, where she would still be able to hope that Ten was just beyond the last trees.
She forced her feet into motion. One step, and then another, over leaves turned gold by winter, lying curled and dead. The crackle of the dry leaves beneath her feet sounded like harsh whispers.
Kami took the last few steps, into the light.
Branches raked the sky, stabbing accusing fingers toward the morning. On the other side of the Crying Pools, along the banks, there was a gleam of frost, a glittering promise of cold to come. The pools looked turquoise in the pale light, opaque as precious stones. The morning sun made the winter air above the pools shine, creating glints of light in the air like the traces of frost on the ground.
Jared had said once, about the Crying Pools, There are people down there who want me to stay with them. He had sunk beneath the water, and she had pulled him out.
Nobody had pulled out Lillian’s sorcerers.
There were people in the Crying Pools now. Kami could see them, not down in the depths but floating on the surface like so much rubbish. Some were spread-eagled on the water, limbs stretched out, hair and clothes trailing. Some were curled in on themselves like dead leaves. The trees stood like witnesses all around. They were all of the sorcerers who had followed Lillian into the woods and to their deaths. Mrs. Thompson, the Hope brothers. Every adult sorcerer who had fought on their side and for their town lay in the still water.
Horror rang through Kami’s mind, her own and Ash’s both, like a scream in a cave that echoed and echoed its own echoes, repeated by the stones, going on forever.
“I don’t think Lillian understood how dangerous it was,” Henry said, his voice soft as if he hardly dared disturb this air.
Kami turned and looked at her friends, standing ranged behind her. Rusty looked gray, as if he was about to be ill. Tears had made shining pools of Holly’s eyes.
I knew, she thought. I knew Jared would have died if I hadn’t come to save him. I should have tried harder to tell Lillian.
But would Lillian have listened? And even if she had understood the danger, would she have cared?
“She seemed so desperate,” Henry said, and Kami saw the guilt she was feeling reflected on his face. “Nobody wanted to argue with her.”
No, Kami thought. She was the Lynburn of Aurimere: they never had.
Henry’s voice sank even lower. “And there was the little boy.”
“Ten,” said Kami. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Wher
e’s Lillian? What has she done to him?”
Henry looked scared to reply, and Kami remembered him saying, I saw strange things going on at Aurimere.
She turned her back on the Crying Pools and plunged back into the woods, not running anymore but walking at a relentless pace, marching to find out the full terrible truth. She heard her friends following her, but she didn’t look back at them. Once she was out of the woods and on the curving path that led up to Aurimere, she saw.
Aurimere stood golden on the hill, dominating the town as it always had.
It was wrapped in a crown of fire.
The line of flame wrapped around the crest of the hill, crimson light filling the windows of Aurimere so the house was watching the town with eyes suddenly turned red. It was like a flying scarlet flag of victory.
A fine investigative reporter she made, Kami thought. She didn’t ask herself the right questions, let alone anyone else. She hadn’t thought about why Rob had spoken to Lillian the way he had, when he’d been leaving to escape and not leaving because they were powerless. She’d just assumed he was gloating.
Rob had known Lillian all their lives. He had known what she would do, how she would use up all her magic so her spell on Aurimere would fail, and he could cross the threshold and have the manor for his own.
He knew what Lillian would do, and he had taken the opportunity she had given him.
“He sent sorcerers down to the woods,” Kami whispered. “After Lillian’s were all dead.”
“I saw them,” Henry whispered. “But they didn’t see me. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t have fought them. And Lillian, she seemed like she had gone mad; her sorcerers were dead. If we had started throwing fire or anything else, someone could have hurt the child. That poor little boy. He saw them all die. He saw the sorcerers coming for him. He never cried; he just stood there watching.
“Rob’s sorcerers took him. They took Lillian. They took them back to Aurimere. I didn’t know how to stop them, I didn’t know what to do, and so I did nothing. I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Kami’s voice sounded distant to her own ears. She believed what she told Henry. There was nothing he could have done but die too, and so many people were dead already, but she could not seem to access the belief on any real level.
She wanted someone to blame. She wanted to hate Lillian, who had stolen Kami’s brother and got all her sorcerers killed, but she could imagine Lillian’s despair. Lillian was a prisoner in her own home now. Ten was a prisoner with her, and Kami knew why Rob would have wanted to take a child, a source, when he hated all sources, when he wanted to wipe all sources from the face of the earth and when he also wanted a child of the town delivered up to him.
Rob wanted her brother for his midwinter sacrifice.
Kami stood still in the shadowy curving road and watched the flames burn around Aurimere. She had been so sure she could act, that somehow she could make a plan and carry it out and stop all this.
Fire cast shadows, Kami realized. There were reflected tongues of brightness and streaks of blackness cast across Sorry-in-the-Vale, swallowing it up in darkness and fire.
The sorcerers had taken back their town.
She hadn’t been able to do a thing.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Laugh at the Night
Kami’s father did not blame her. He did not ask a single question when she told him about Ten, only drew her close and rested his cheek against her hair. “I’m glad you’re safe,” he said.
It had been a silent unanimous decision to come to the Water Rising. Kami’s home did not feel safe any longer. Tomo seemed glad to be somewhere else, or just glad to be with her and Dad. He was sleeping in the parlor, head pillowed against Dad’s chest. If Dad even shifted position, Tomo whimpered in his sleep.
Kami was thankful he was sleeping, because it meant he had stopped asking for Mum. None of them had any idea where she was.
Henry had taken a room and disappeared in there. Holly had gone back home, to see if her parents had returned or whether they were installed at Aurimere with Rob. Angela and Rusty had gone with her.
“We’ll be right back,” Angela had said, holding on to Kami’s hands. “Holly won’t stay with them. She just has to see.”
“Of course,” Kami said.
Angela had held both her hands, which had felt intensely strange as a gesture from undemonstrative Angela, and looked into her face. “Rusty can go with her,” she’d offered at last. “I could stay.”
“No,” Kami said. “I have Dad and Tomo and Jared here. I’m fine. You should go.”
Angela’s eyes had searched Kami’s face, Kami didn’t know for what. She had to turn her own eyes away from that gaze.
“I’ll be right back,” Angela promised, and gave her a swift ferocious hug before she went, Angela’s hair and perfume blocking out all the rest of the world for a moment.
Despite how numb Kami felt, it was a comfort. She closed the door of the inn behind the three of them, Holly looking anxiously over her shoulder at Kami as they went down the street, and turned back.
The people in the pub had not asked any questions. The townspeople appeared to be steadfastly ignoring the fires burning around Aurimere.
Walking past one table, Kami heard Mr. Stearn say “Lynburns” and stopped to hear the end of his sentence. “Settled it among themselves,” he said.
Kami opened her mouth to speak and found she did not know what to say. There was too much: her brother, the sorcerers in the woods, how she had allowed her mind to be invaded for nothing at all. Mr. Stearn stared up at her, eyes bleary and defiant, as if he expected her to argue with him. She passed on to the bar, which Jared was leaning against, talking quietly to Martha Wright.
“If you want,” Martha was saying, in a low voice, “if things are bad with your folks, we have your room upstairs. Just like you left it. Your brother can stay too. As long as you need.”
If things are bad with your folks. As if Jared had been grounded over his motorbike, when people were dead.
“Do you want to know what happened?” Kami asked.
Martha looked at the bar and not at her. “What can we do?” she said in return, very quietly. She didn’t mean it as an offer, that much was clear. She meant she was helpless. She meant they were all helpless.
“Thank you,” Jared told her seriously. Martha looked up at his face and smiled before she hurried off to the other side of the bar.
“You’ve got a fan there, Lynburn,” Kami observed.
“It’s my aristocratic bone structure,” Jared said. “Women of all ages are enslaved by it. My cheekbones command, and they obey.” His voice was flat, his fingers tracing the whorls and lines of the old wood that formed the bar. Kami could not force a smile, not even one as feeble as Martha Wright’s.
Ash was in her head, inescapable as water when you were drowning. He had no idea how to shield his emotions from her. She felt the cold weight of his presence even though he was wounded in bed, and felt like she could not breathe and would never be able to again.
“Come here a minute,” Jared said. He headed across the room to where there was an alcove, formed by a large diamond-paned window that was set deep in the wall and that opened onto the Wrights’ tiny yard.
Kami followed him and leaned against the wall on one side of the window. Through the small faintly green panes she could see the dusty gray of concrete, the steel gray of rubbish bins, and the crimson gleam of reflected fire. She realized she was too much of a coward right now to look at Jared.
She knew how he’d felt about their link. She’d known what her being Ash’s source would do to him. She’d done it anyway.
She’d thought she had to do it, and it had been her choice to make.
Except that she was so tired, and she knew what it was like, to feel as if he hated her. She didn’t know if she could bear it again.
“How are you?” Jared asked, voice pitched low, as if he was
trying to be gentle.
Kami was startled enough to look up into his face. He was looking down at her already. She did not know what he was thinking and never would again, but she remembered with exquisite clarity how he had looked when he hated her and he didn’t look like that now. The once-cruel curve of his mouth was now a line that trembled a little out of shape when he saw her face. “I don’t know,” Kami said. “I can’t think about it, about Ten. I can’t think about it yet.”
“Because you don’t know what to do,” Jared said.
“Yes,” Kami agreed, feeling shock wash over her because of how exactly right he was. That all this could have happened, and she had been helpless. “With Ash wounded, and Lillian gone, if we do something before we’re ready and Ten gets hurt . . .”
“But you will do something,” Jared said. “You’ll work something out. You don’t have to know what to do right away. It’s all right not to know.”
Kami laughed and the laugh caught in her throat. “It doesn’t feel all right.”
It felt like she was drifting, floating as helplessly as the sorcerers in the Crying Pools. If she didn’t know what to do, if she didn’t have a plan, then everything was a mess and she could do nothing but be at the mercy of her own feelings, terror and longing and panic dragging her down.
She couldn’t be like this.
“It is all right,” Jared said. “It’s going to be.” He lifted a hand but did not touch her, fingers tracing the curve of her cheek in the air. She could almost feel his skin against hers. She wanted to turn her face into his hand but could not bring herself to make that move: he had not really touched her, and maybe he did not want to.
“Don’t hate me,” she said in a low voice, and turned her face away, resting her cheek against the glass.
“What?” Jared asked. He spoke loudly enough so that she looked up at him again, and saw his face had gone colder, scar pulled tight and eyes like white ice with black water rushing beneath.
“I know that you said—that you were begging me not to, with Ash,” Kami told him unsteadily. “I know I said I wouldn’t do it.”