Shouldn’t we keep them from watching this? I asked Emma with a rather crazed glance.
Emma shot back an equally crazed look that said, Oh, believe me, I’ve tried.
A creaking, groaning noise came from outside. I returned my attention to the window. The thorn vines were freezing in place from the base upward, their heavily spiked tendrils zigzagging into sharp angles as they stiffened, forming a dense, impenetrable-looking thicket. Vertigo swooped through my stomach. I abandoned my efforts at searching the yard and focused inward instead, concentrating on the ensorcellment bond between us. Surely if something had happened to Rook, I would have felt his reaction. The vines weren’t dead, just motionless. Whatever was going on out there, he’d done it on purpose—hadn’t he?
The kitchen door banged open and boots thudded through the hallway, Rook’s long stride unmistakable. I briefly pressed my eyes closed, riding out the relieved dizziness that washed over me. But I didn’t have a chance to indulge in the sensation.
“He’s coming,” Rook said as soon as he entered the room. “We have little time.”
His chest heaved like a bellows, and his hair was so rumpled he looked as though he’d been standing in the middle of a storm. One of his sleeves was rolled up, with a dishrag from our kitchen messily bound around his forearm. I tried not to consider the implications of this—he’d never needed to bind his wounds before. Maybe he just didn’t want to make a mess with his blood indoors.
Grimly, Emma and I met each other’s eyes across the parlor.
“Can you take the twins to the cellar?” I asked.
This might be the last time we ever saw each other alive. The knowledge made holding her gaze like staring into the sun. She had sworn to raise me and keep me safe, but now faced losing me to the same force that had already shattered our lives once. And suddenly I knew with terrible clarity that if she lost me, she didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pick herself back up again. In that moment there were two Emmas transposed over each other—the Emma who had raised me, and the Emma she kept hidden from me, an Emma I’d barely even met before. An Emma I might never have the chance to get to know as I grew older.
The spell broke.
“You heard your sister,” Emma said briskly, though she sounded very tired. She came over and picked March up. May slid off the settee, subdued. Both twins watched me uncertainly. I couldn’t start crying again. Not now.
“I love you all and I’ll be done by lunchtime,” I declared in my best Isobel’s-a-busy-perfectionist voice. When May opened her mouth I interrupted, “May, I know you don’t hate me.” If I gave her the chance to say it herself, I wouldn’t be able to maintain my composure. “Now hurry up.”
Before they went, Emma pressed a kiss to the top of my head. I set my jaw and tilted my face toward the ceiling, and waited until I heard their feet thumping down the stairs to let the tears fall. Sniffing industriously, I swiped the wetness away on my wrists, stabbed my paintbrush into a whorl of vermilion and lead tin yellow, and got back to work. It was just finishing touches now. A handful of flaws glared at me from the canvas—a patch of shadow that needed more purple light reflected on it, a slab of the crown that could use more highlights for dimension—but I didn’t have time to fix them all. The most important part, I told myself, was done.
Fabric swished as Rook moved to stand beside me. As he absorbed what I had wrought, a profound stillness settled over him. That stillness told me everything I needed to know. A pause, and then I set my brush down. Confidence swelled within me as surely and calmly as the rising tide, filling in every cavernous doubt.
My Craft was true.
A horn sounded, rattling the windows in their frames, low-pitched and sonorous with disdain. Sunlight speared through the parlor as crystal shattered outside—the thorns had fallen to the Alder King. Buoyed by a giddy certainty as intoxicating as wine, I looked up at Rook and smiled.
He tore his gaze from the portrait, startled. At some point his glamour had fled from him. His hair hung in a wild snarl around the disquieting planes of his face. He scrutinized me with inhuman eyes, cruel eyes that weren’t made to show kindness or tenderness or love, but they still spoke clearly to the fact that I was behaving oddly, even for a mortal, and especially for me.
“You’ve run out of magic,” I said softly, touching his wrist. Amber-colored blood had soaked through the makeshift bandage.
He flinched, and his expression shuttered. He raised his hand and looked at it front and back, taking in the long, spidery, oddly jointed fingers as if the sight disturbed him as much as it would a mortal.
“The ensorcellment draws upon my strength,” he said. “I cannot protect you from him any longer.”
“You won’t need to,” I replied.
A tremor shook the floor. Though I sensed no further movement, the whole house groaned as though lifted several inches from its foundations by brute force. When it settled with a resounding thud, all the boards shook and plaster dust trickled down from the ceiling. Rook glanced around, seeing something I could not. I didn’t need to ask. The enchantment on my home was broken. The Alder King had come here for only one reason, after all—to kill us both. And he wasn’t wasting any time.
I pushed aside the pillows and stood. My knees gave way for the third time in twenty-four hours, and Rook caught me again, holding me up as though I weighed nothing. I reached for the portrait.
“Isobel,” he said. My hand paused. “I am not very good at—declarations,” he went on, after a hesitation. And then he hesitated some more, looking down at me, absorbing the sight, and seeming to forget whatever it was he had on his mind.
“I know,” I assured him fondly. “I seem to remember you insulting my short legs the first time, among other things.”
He drew up a bit. “In my defense, they are very short, and I cannot tell a lie.”
“So what you’re trying to say is that you love me, short legs and all?”
“Yes. And—no. Isobel, I love you wholly. I love you eternally. I love you so dearly it frightens me. I fear I could not live without you. I could see your face every morning upon waking for ten thousand years and still look forward to the next as though it were the first.”
“I think we disparaged you too much,” I breathed. “That was a fine declaration indeed.”
I seized his collar and pulled him down for a kiss, ghoulish countenance and all, ignoring his muffled sound of protest, which did not remain on his lips for long. His teeth were sharp, but he kissed me with such tenderness and care it didn’t matter. A flower blossomed inside me, a soft, rare bloom aching for light and wind and touch. In another world, it might have been our last kiss. In this one, I wouldn’t allow it.
We broke apart as a shadow crossed the window. Reluctantly Rook released me, and I tottered forward on legs as weak as a newborn fawn’s. I took up the portrait like a shield and turned around.
Something was happening to my door. Dark, glistening spots spread across it like an ink spill soaking through a page, or a candle flame blackening a piece of paper from beneath. It wasn’t until the sweet stench of decay hit me, and white mold fuzzed over the surface, that I realized the door was rotting. It sagged on its hinges, wood warping. The boards peeled away in strips, disintegrating into spongy lumps as they fell. The brass doorknob clattered to the floor and rolled into a corner. And the Alder King ducked inside, bending at the waist and turning his broad shoulders sideways to fit through the now-empty doorway. The light eclipsed him from behind, transforming him into a black silhouette too bright to see. Heat rolled across the room.
I had had many fair folk in my parlor, yet never one like him. As he straightened, the sun of a different age kindled fire in his beard and glowed on his emerald surcoat, striking him at an angle and intensity for which the room’s windows were not responsible. He was from a time that was not our time, and the weight of it enveloped him like a cloak. Conscious that I was so small standing in front of him I might as well have been a child, I took a step forward. He didn’t look at me. It was as though he didn’t even see me. Beneath the heavy brows his eyes searched through an eternity of years, seeking the present, looking for an hour and a day less significant to him than a single mote of dust suspended in the air among uncountable thousands.