“Oh,” said Ruth, magic turning her blackened hair red again, like a sea of blood drowning out ashes. “I will.”
Rob turned away from Kami and Ash toward the townspeople sitting in the hall.
“You did not offer me a winter sacrifice on the day appointed,” he said. “Your sacrifice was late. I hope that I have taught you all a lesson, and I will expect evidence that you have learned. I want you all to give me tokens to show that you have submitted. And at the spring equinox, I want you to choose me another sacrifice.”
There was a murmur of dismay from the crowd, as if they had honestly thought that death would make them safe. Kami heard a sob, wild and loud, and saw Chris Fairchild’s wife collapse into a neighbor’s arms. Rob looked around, mouth curved as if smiling at a private joke.
“One more sacrifice. One more season. Then I promise you on my word as the Lynburn of Aurimere, there will be peace for Sorry-in-the-Vale.”
Rob and his sorcerers left. Ash hung onto Kami, his heart beating a wild frantic rhythm against her back, even after they were gone.
Kami heard the whispers of the people around her, rising up to the low ceiling, slipping out of the broken windows, saying that they had no other choice, that everything would be all right, that there would be advantages, that the old ways were the best ways, that they could not be held responsible. She saw women taking their hair down, about to snip it off as a token for their sorcerous leader. Nobody was looking at the dead man on the altar.
She did not have to listen long, because finally the others arrived, all of them running, sunshine-haired Holly, tall, dark, and terminally idle Rusty, and Kami’s best friend in all the world, Angela. Holly was trembling. Even Rusty did not look his usual unconcerned self.
Angela took one look at the altar and curled her scarlet lip.
“Goddamn sorcerers,” she said. “It is the goddamn weekend.”
A few people looked outraged by Angela’s flippancy, but Holly smiled a tiny smile. Angela did not notice anyone’s reactions, because she was busy making threats.
“Ash, let go of Kami this minute or I will punch you in the face.”
Ash let go of Kami. Kami punched him in the arm.
“I didn’t know that all my choices were punching,” Ash said, rubbing his arm.
“Don’t ever grab me like that again,” Kami told him. “Or your whole life will be punching.”
She crossed to the stone steps where Angela stood, and Rusty made room for her beside his sister, so she could lean into Angela a little. Angela glanced down at her face.
“What is it?” she asked. “Is it this, or is there something else as well?”
“My mother,” Kami said quietly. “She told me something about Jared today.”
Angela grasped Kami’s hand and held it tight. That gesture, and the look on Holly’s face, let Kami know that they had already expected to hear news of Jared’s death. They were both utterly unsurprised.
She looked at Rusty. He was frowning slightly, biting his lip. He looked conflicted.
“Cambridge,” he said, “can we go somewhere and talk?”
Kami followed Rusty down the steps and away from the building that bore the words that promised all men would welcome deceit, the building where people she’d thought she knew had watched a man die.
Rusty was moving fast, as Rusty, lazy as he was sweet, hardly ever did. Kami could barely keep up with him.
“What’s this about?” Kami asked.
Rusty glanced over his shoulder at her. There was something apprehensive about his look, as if he was not quite sure she would still be there. Or as if he was not quite sure he wanted her to be.
“You’re going to be angry,” he predicted.
Chapter Two
Buried Alive
The last two times Rob Lynburn had opened the priest hole, Jared had tried to kill him.
The first time, Jared had tried to strangle Rob with his bare hands, and the second time he had used a weapon. There were not many weapons available when buried alive in a wall. The body of Edmund Prescott, twenty years dead, his fair hair turned white and brittle and hanging like spiderwebs in his gray sunken face, was all that Jared had.
Jared had shoved up Edmund’s sleeve, rotten and disintegrating under his hand. Underneath his clothes, Edmund’s body had shriveled to nothing but papery skin over bones. Jared tore the skin away and ripped a bone free out of the forearm.
He had spent some time—he did not know how long, time was hard to tell in this lightless trap—sharpening the bone against the stone wall of his prison. Hiding the bone in his sleeve, he waited.
Rob had lifted him out, and Jared had pretended to be more drugged than he was, head lolling, mumbling something about help and his mother. Rob had bent over him, almost seeming concerned.
Jared had whipped out his weapon and tried to plunge the bone into Rob’s throat.
He had caught Rob unawares. Some of Rob’s sorcerers had been with him and one had grabbed Jared’s arm, pulling it back, so the wound was shallow instead of the gaping hole Jared had planned. The next minute, Jared had been pinned to the floor by the sorcerers as he struggled and lashed out under their hands, Rob’s rage washing over him as magical pain.Rob had taken hold of Jared’s hair and banged his head, rhythmically and sickeningly hard, against the stone floor.
“Very resourceful, my boy,” he’d said. “I’m impressed. Don’t try it again.”
They had left Edmund Prescott’s body in the priest hole with him, but Jared had not tried it again. They would be expecting it now.
The food they gave him was drugged with something that made him drowsy and his magic not work. At first he did not eat it, but it became clear the choice was eat drugged food or starve to death, and the food let the days slip by faster, filled them full of dreams.
He was sitting with his head against the wall, dreaming, when the priest hole opened, a pale square of light on the wall above him. He felt himself being dragged up by magic, back against the wall, helpless as a puppet on Rob’s string.
The light of day hurt his eyes: he squinted, dazzled, and in his blurry vision Rob’s face almost looked kind.
“How are you today, Jared?” he asked gently. “Ready to be a dutiful son?”
Jared was lying on the ground. He knew he must look pitiful, dirty from the grave below, not able to see or stand: he tried to raise himself on one elbow and could not quite manage it—the elbow kept slipping away from him.
“Yeah,” he grated out. “I’ll be a good boy. Don’t put me back down there.”
Sight and sound slipped out of his reach: the last thing he saw as his vision darkened was Rob’s proud smile.
Jared woke up in his room in Aurimere. He remembered a time when he hadn’t liked his bedroom, its high ceilings and the rich red velvet drapes, but now it was his, his yellowed old books piled in a corner, his weights kept under the bed, the whole room familiar as his aunt Lillian’s voice in the hall. Just lying on his bed was a profound and amazing relief.
After lying there for some time, he crawled off the bed. It was pathetic how weak he was, his body cramped from the priest hole and feeling fragile somehow, as if he had become suddenly old. His limbs ached and his muscles burned as he made for the shower: he almost fell a few times but doggedly stumbled toward it, and did fall into the claw-footed bathtub.
He was finally under the spray of water, beating out some of the snarls in his shoulders. It hurt fiercely as well, like being under a rain of hot needles, but it was worth it.
He wanted to get the dirt and the smell of the priest hole off him, the old blood on his skin, the filth, the enclosed, built-up dust, and the drier dust smell that was Edmund. He scrubbed and when he didn’t have the strength to scrub he continued to stand there under the water, leaning against the wall, until he realized that the water had been icy cold for some time.
He staggered out of the tub, shaved while avoiding looking at himself in the mirror, and chose random clothes in his wardrobe that he pulled over his still-wet skin. They felt clean and light, almost unbelievably luxurious. Now that he was dressed, he could go to where the curtains were open, each curtain held by a gilded rope. He undid the ropes and the dazzling, painful sunlight was shut out.
Jared thought he could lie down again now. He went over to the other side of the bed, since the pillow he’d been lying on was gray as if … well, as if someone had crawled out of a tomb and left grave dirt everywhere he touched.
The door creaked open and Jared turned around, fast, his hand clenching in the bedclothes. He felt so pathetically weak, like a hunted, exhausted animal, hearing predators close in.
At the door was Ross Phillips, a boy from Kami’s year. Jared found himself staring, unsure, when he would have been wary of an adult sorcerer. This was a kid his own age, no matter what magic he wielded or whose side he was on.
Ross stared back and him, and then bowed his head. It was, Jared realized, a gesture of submission to his master’s son.
He said, “It’s good that you’re up. Your father wants to talk to you.”
Climbing the stairs of the bell tower meant Jared had to pause several times, sick and dizzy, to lean against the curving wall in the darkness. Every time, he had to take a deep breath and will himself farther up the stairs.
When he dragged himself in at last, he saw Rob waiting patiently in the space where the story said a great golden bell had once hung, before Jared’s ancestor Elinor Lynburn had taken it and hidden it from soldiers in the Sorrier River, never to be discovered. Rob’s hands were folded behind his back and he was turned away from Jared, apparently contemplating the view.
Sorry-in-the-Vale was laid out before him like a meal.
“Did you rest?” Rob asked him. He turned toward Jared, unhurriedly, as if it had not occurred to him that Jared could shove him right out of the tower.
It had occurred to Jared. He had used his magic to kill one father before, the first father, the man he had believed was his father before he knew about Sorry-in-the-Vale or magic or any of this. He had used magic to throw Dad down a flight of stairs and break his neck.
It would be different if he pushed Rob. Rob was a sorcerer. He could command the air to bear him up or carry him gently to the ground. So Jared nodded and smiled at him instead. He had been told his smiles were disquieting, and Rob did look briefly taken aback before giving him a fatherly smile in return.
He said, “We’re going to keep drugging your food. I hope you understand that, my boy.”
“Seems sensible,” Jared observed.
“And we’re going to have to restrict your movements to Aurimere itself,” Rob continued. “It grieves me to say this when your agreement to join me has made me happy and proud. But let’s face it, you weren’t exactly eager, were you?”
“I was under a bit of duress,” said Jared. “You make a really compelling argument. Join me or get walled up alive with a corpse? You should be a politician.”
Rob laughed, to all appearances amused by his son’s sassy ways.
“I don’t plan on taking any chances,” he let Jared know. “I realize that you are complying with my wishes largely out of fear. But I do hope that will change as you realize that you have chosen the right side.”
“The side that’s going to win, you mean?”
“The side that’s already won,” Rob told him sympathetically, as if he was breaking the news to Jared that Santa Claus did not exist. “Aurimere is mine. The town is mine. All Lillian’s sorcerers are dead. There is nobody left to fight me, and no hope for those who might wish to try.”
“Good for you,” said Jared, looking off into the distance. “I don’t see what you need me for. What do you want me to do?”
“Be my son,” said Rob. “Be at my side. Nothing more. You might think about what you want to do, though.”