Cheating a glance back, I see him. He’s off his horse and leading it to the stables. Nicasia still sits atop hers, her head tipped back, laughing at something he said. He’s smiling, too, but it’s not his usual sneer. He doesn’t look like the wicked villain from a story. He looks like an inhuman boy out for a walk with his friend in the moonlight.
Sophie staggers onward. We can’t get caught now, not when we’re so close.
The moment when I cross into the pine-needle-strewn woods, I let out an enormous breath. I keep her moving until we reach the stream. I make her walk through it, though the cold water and sucking mud slows us down. Any way of hiding our tracks is worth doing.
Eventually, she sinks down on the bank and gives over to weeping. I watch her, wishing I knew what to do. Wishing I was a better, more sympathetic person, instead of being annoyed and worried that any delay is going to get us caught. I make myself sit on the remains of a termite-eaten log on the bank of the stream and let her cry, but when minutes have passed and her tears haven’t stopped, I go over and kneel in the muddy grass.
“It’s not far to my house,” I say, trying to sound persuasive. “Just a little more walking.”
“Shut up!” she shouts, lifting her hand to ward me off.
Frustration flares. I want to scream at her. I want to shake her. I bite my tongue and fist my hands to make myself stop.
“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “This is happening fast, I know. But I really do want to help you. I can get you out of Faerie. Tonight.”
The girl is shaking her head again. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. I was at Burning Man, and there was this guy who said he had this gig passing hors d’oeuvres for a rich weirdo in one of the air-conditioned tents. Just don’t take anything, he told me. If you do, you’ll have to serve me for a thousand years. …”
Her voice trails off, but now I see how she was trapped. It must have sounded like he was making a joke. She must have laughed, and he must have smiled. And then, whether she ate a single shrimp puff or pocketed some of the silverware—it would all be the same.
“It’s okay,” I say nonsensically. “It’s going to be okay.”
She looks at me and seems to see me for the first time, takes in that I am dressed like her, like a servant, but that there’s something off about me. “Who are you? What is this place? What happened to us?”
I asked for her name, so I guess I should give her mine. “I’m Jude. I grew up here. One of my sisters, she can take you over the sea to the human town near here. From there, you can call someone to get you or you can go to the police and they’ll find your people. This is almost over.”
Sophie takes this in. “Is this some kind of—what happened? I remember things, impossible things. And I wanted. No, I couldn’t have wanted …”
Her voice trails off, and I don’t know what to say. I cannot guess the end of her sentence.
“Please, just tell me this isn’t real. I don’t think I can live with any of this being real.” She’s looking around the forest, as though if she can prove it isn’t magic, then nothing else is, either. Which is stupid. All forests are magic.
“Come on,” I say, because while I don’t like the way she’s talking, there’s no point in lying for the sake of making her feel better. She’s going to have to accept that she’s been trapped in Faerie. It’s not as if I have a boat to take her across the water; all I have are Vivi’s ragwort steeds. “Can you walk a little farther now?” The faster she’s back in the human world, the better.
As I get closer to Madoc’s, I remember my cloak, still bunched up and hidden in a woodpile outside Hollow Hall, and curse myself all over again. Leading Sophie to the stables, I seat her in an empty stall. She slumps on the hay. I think the glimpse of the giant toad undid the last of her trust in me.
“Here we are,” I say with forced cheerfulness. “I’m going inside to get my sister, and I want you to wait right here. Promise me.”
She gives me a terrible look. “I can’t do this. I can’t face this.”
“You have to.” My voice comes out harsher than I intended. I stalk into the house and go up the steps as quickly as I can, hoping against hope that I don’t run into anyone else on the way. I fling open the door to Vivienne’s room without bothering to knock.
Vivi, thankfully, is lying on her bed, writing a letter in green ink with drawings of hearts and stars and faces in the margins. She looks up when I come in, tossing back her hair. “That’s an interesting outfit you’ve got on.”
“I did something really stupid,” I say, out of breath.
That makes her push herself up, sliding off the bed and onto her feet. “What happened?”
“I stole a human girl—a human servant—from Prince Balekin, and I need you to help me get her back to the mortal world before anyone finds out.” As I say this, I realize all over again how ridiculous it was for me to do that—how risky, how foolish. He will just find another human willing to make a bad bargain.
But Vivi doesn’t chide me. “Okay, let me put on my shoes. I thought you were going to tell me you’d killed someone.”
“Why would you think that?” I ask.
She snorts as she searches around for boots. Her eyes meet mine as she does up the laces. “Jude, you keep smiling a pleasant smile in front of Madoc, but all I can see anymore is bared teeth.”
I am not sure what to say to that.
She puts on a long, fur-trimmed green coat with frog clasps. “Where is the girl?”
“In the stables,” I say. “I’ll take you—”
Vivi shakes her head. “Absolutely not. You have to get out of those clothes. Put on a dress and go down to dinner and make sure you act like everything’s normal. If someone comes to question you, tell them you’ve been in your room this whole time.”
“No one saw me!” I say.
Vivi gives me her best fish-eyed look. “No one? You’re sure.”
I think of Cardan, riding up as we made our escape, and of the guards, whom I’d lied to. “Probably no one,” I amend. “No one who noticed anything.” If Cardan had, he would never have let me get away. He would never have given up having that much power over me.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says, holding up a forbidding, long-fingered hand. “Jude, it isn’t safe.”
“I’m going,” I insist. “The girl’s name is Sophie, and she’s really freaked out—”
Vivi snorts. “I bet.”
“I don’t think she’ll go with you. You look like one of them.” Maybe I am more afraid of my nerve running out than anything else. I worry about the adrenaline ebbing out of my body, leaving me to face the mad thing I have done. But given Sophie’s suspicion of me, I absolutely think that Vivi’s cat eyes would be enough to send her over the edge. “Because you are one of them.”
“Are you telling me in case I forgot?” Vivi asks.
“We’ve got to go,” I say. “And I am coming. We don’t have time to debate this.”
“Come, then,” she says. Together, we go down the stairs, but as we are about to go out the door, she grabs my shoulder. “You can’t save our mother, you know. She’s already dead.”
I feel as though she has slapped me.
“That’s not—”
“Isn’t it?” she demands. “Isn’t that what you’re doing? Tell me this girl isn’t some stand-in for Mom. Some surrogate.”
“I want to help Sophie,” I say, shrugging off her grip. “Just Sophie.”
Outside, the moon is high in the sky, turning the leaves silver. Vivi goes out to pick a bouquet of ragwort stalks. “Fine, then go get this Sophie.”
She is where I left her, hunched in the hay, rocking back and forth and talking softly to herself. I am relieved to see her, relieved she didn’t run off and we weren’t even now tracking her through the forest, relieved that someone from Balekin’s household hadn’t ferreted out her location and hauled her away.
“Okay,” I say with forced cheerfulness. “We’re ready.”
“Yes,” she says, standing up. Her face is tearstained, but she’s no longer crying. She looks like she’s in shock.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her again, but she doesn’t answer. She follows me mutely out behind the stables, where Vivi is waiting, along with two rawboned ponies with green eyes and lacy manes.
Sophie looks at them and then at Vivi. She begins to back away, shaking her head. When I come near her, she backs away from me, too.
“No, no, no,” she says. “Please, no. No more. No.”
“It’s only a very little bit of magic,” Vivi says reasonably, but it’s still coming from someone with lightly furred points on her ears and eyes that flash gold in the dark. “Just a smidgen, and then you won’t ever have to see another magical thing. You’ll be back in the mortal world, the daylight world, the normal world. But this is the only way to get you there. We’re going to fly.”
“No,” Sophie says, her voice coming out broken.
“Let’s walk to the cliffside near here,” I say. “You’ll be able to see the lights—maybe even a few boats. You’ll feel better when you can see a destination.”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Vivi reminds me with a significant look.
“It’s not far,” I argue. I don’t know what else to do. The only other choices I can think of are knocking her unconscious or asking Vivi to glamour her; both are terrible.
And so we walk through the woods, ragwort steeds following. Sophie doesn’t balk. The walk seems to calm her. She picks up rocks as we go, smooth stones that she dusts the dirt from and then puts in her pockets.
“Do you remember your life from before?” I ask her.
She nods and doesn’t speak for a little while, but then she turns back to me. She gives a weird croaking laugh. “I always wanted there to be magic,” she says. “Isn’t that funny? I wanted there to be an Easter Bunny and a Santa Claus. And Tinker Bell, I remember Tinker Bell. But I don’t want it. I don’t want it anymore.”
“I know,” I say. And I do. I have wished for many things over the years, but the first wish of my heart was that none of this was real.
At the water’s edge, Vivi mounts one of the steeds and puts Sophie up before her. I swing up onto the back of the other. Sophie gives the forest a trembling look and then glances over at me. She doesn’t seem afraid. She seems as though maybe she’s starting to believe that the worst is behind her.
“Hold on tight,” Vivi says, and her steed kicks up off the cliff and into the air. Mine follows. The wild exhilaration of flying hits me, and I grin with familiar delight. Beneath us are the whitecapped waves and ahead the shimmering lights of mortal towns, like a mysterious land strewn with stars. I glance over at Sophie, hoping to give her a reassuring smile.
Sophie isn’t looking at me, though. Her eyes are closed. And then, as I am watching, she tilts to one side, lets go of the steed’s mane, and lets herself fall. Vivi grabs for her, but it’s too late. She is plunging soundlessly through the night sky, toward the mirrored darkness of the sea.
When she hits, there is barely even a splash.
I cannot speak. Everything seems to slow around me. I think of Sophie’s cracked lips, think of her saying, Please, just tell me this isn’t real. I don’t think I can live with any of this being real.
I think of the stones she filled her pockets with.
I hadn’t been listening. I hadn’t wanted to hear her; I’d just wanted to save her.
And now, because of me, she is dead.