“The story is unclear,” Lillian conceded. “There is also mention of a woman on Arthur’s side who could do magic. The Lady of the Lake.”
“Uh,” said Jared, “I’d rather be Merlin.”
Lillian smiled a small scarlet smile. “A sorcerer has to go through fire and water to reach their full power. Especially water. I think the Lady was the real sorcerer.”
“You see how it works,” said Rob. “We all know the name of the source. We can never be sure who the sorcerer was. The sorcerer does not matter. There has not been a sorcerer and a source in Sorry-in-the-Vale since 1480 for a reason. I don’t want that kind of life for my nephew.”
“I’m okay,” Jared said. Kami felt him reaching for her and knew he said it more for her benefit than Rob’s.
From the look on Rob’s face, he knew that too. “Are you? Or are you just saying what she wants to hear? Sources influence your emotions as well as control your magic. You haven’t known about sorcery long, I know, but you have to understand how serious this is. She could cut you off from your own magic any time she liked. You have to understand that she has absolute power over you.”
Kami sat stricken.
“You have to understand,” said Jared, “that that’s what I want.”
Rosalind’s ragged breathing caught on another sob. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she told Rob. “I would never do anything to upset you.”
That piteous appeal made Kami look not at Rosalind or at Rob, but at Lillian, to see how she took this evidence that her twin sister was still in love with her husband. Lillian had not turned a hair. She was looking at Jared, her blue eyes narrowed with interest. “My sister did this to you?” she inquired. “I understood that taking a source was voluntary.”
“She did this to us,” said Jared. “She put a spell on Kami’s mother to see through her eyes before either of us was born.”
“I didn’t know what would happen,” Rosalind said sharply, lifting her tear-wet face from her hands. “That woman, Claire, she wasn’t a Glass. There was no way she could have been a source. I didn’t know she was having a baby, or that you could find a source that way, across distances, without saying the words. I just wanted to make a bridge from me to Sorry-in-the-Vale.”
“And instead you made a bridge for a source to your son,” Rob said. He was the only one in the room who looked concerned for Jared.
So this was why the Glass family had a house built where the Lynburns could keep their eye on it, why the family was meant to stay where the Lynburns could keep their eye on them.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” said Rosalind, swallowing another sob. “I didn’t know anything. Not until he was born, and he was such a terrible baby. The city was like a cage. There was nowhere to go, but then there was another Lynburn with me. But he wasn’t ever like us. He was always talking to someone else. He used to turn his face away from me. It was as impossible to love him as it was to love David.”
“Rosalind,” Lillian snapped. “He was a child. You linked his mind with another child’s. And you are Lynburns. You had somewhere to go. As soon as you realized what you had done, you should have come to me.”
“I didn’t do it,” Rosalind said, and looked beseechingly at Rob. Her fingers were white on the arms of the sofa. “Not really. It was Jared. He chose to make the connection. It was Jared and that girl.”
Lillian’s voice crackled, impatience breaking up the smooth flow of her commands. “I wish you would take some responsibility for once!”
“And what about you?” Rosalind demanded. “What about what you’ve done? What about what you did to me?” She rose from the sofa, one hand wrapped around the walnut wood bolster that held up the canopy.
Lillian tilted her chin and regarded her coolly without getting up. “I do not regret anything I have ever done. That is a policy of mine.”
“You have no heart,” Rosalind said, low. “You never did.”
“The mistress of Lynburn does not need a heart,” Lillian told her.
Rosalind cast a look at Rob, as if expecting something. When Rob stayed silent, she ran from the room. Ash sidestepped fast, bowing his head, to get out of her way. She had not looked once at Jared.
Lillian had scarcely looked away. Kami did not much like the way she looked at him, the appraisal of the woman who thought she owned every blade of grass in the Vale.
“None of this is Kami’s fault,” said Ash. His head stayed bowed.
“Of course not,” Lillian said absently. She leaned forward, eyes narrowed and her focus solely on Jared. “We could test the limits of your ability.”
Rob shifted away from his wife and rose to his feet. For a moment, Kami thought he would run out the door after Rosalind. “We know the limits of his ability!” he said. “Rosalind chained his powers to someone else before he was born. I would never have believed she would do such a thing. I will not allow it to continue.”
The room blurred before Kami’s eyes, the Lynburns pale gold spots in her vision as if they were made of light. “It doesn’t have to continue?” she asked. “There’s a way to stop it?”
“A way to sever the connection? Yes,” said Rob Lynburn. “I beg you to do it.”
“How—” Kami began.
At the same time, and far more loudly, Jared said, “No.”
Kami let her fingers brush Jared’s shoulder: it was tensed, hard and unyielding as stone, but stone would not have flinched away from her. “I think we should hear what he has to say.”
“No!” Jared repeated. He wrenched himself up to wheel on Kami.
For a moment, he was just another one of the Lynburns. All of them were staring at her now, the creatures of red and gold, with demands in their eyes, and the only thing she wanted was to escape.
But I can’t escape you, can I? she asked him. And that’s why I think we should listen to your uncle and weigh our options.
I don’t want options, said Jared.
Now Kami was angry. Jared said things like this all the time, as if—and then he didn’t do anything about it. He didn’t seem to want to touch her, ever. So why did he talk like that? She could read his mind, so he should make more sense! “Jared and I need to talk this over alone.”
“Why?” Ash asked, his voice unexpected in that hushed room, his eyes fastened on Kami. “Why do you need to be alone?” he asked. “You can read each other’s minds.”
“Thank you for pointing that out; I wasn’t aware,” Kami told him. “And yes, it would be fantastic to have a silent conversation with all of you looking on.” She stood up. It didn’t give her much of a height advantage, but she glared up at Jared and over at Ash anyway. “None of this was Jared’s fault. None of this was my fault either. You may think I don’t matter because I’m not a sorcerer, but I don’t care for being threatened or being ignored. And you know what? I’m going to go.”
I’ll go with you, Jared said.
Do what you want, said Kami. She passed Rob and Lillian without looking at them. She was radiating so much fury that it acted as a force field, because Ash took a step back and blinked in surprise.
Jared did not back off, of course. As Kami stormed out of the sorcerers’ parlor, he was right behind her.
Once out of the parlor and down the couple of steps, Kami hesitated. She didn’t want to walk back through the hall of cutting wind and glass. The room she was in now had a window, floor-to-ceiling pale yellow panes. The garden spread out beyond the glass, transformed into smooth bright lines.
Kami went for the side door, tucked narrow and dark against that wide light expanse of window. When she clutched the doorknob, another fist-shaped one, the black iron knuckles pressed too hard into her palm. The door opened and the sunshine hit Kami, flooding warm over her hair and skin. She felt pure relief as she emerged from the cold manor.
Kami went and leaned against the wall attached to the rockery. She was staring at the ground and saw Jared’s shadow falling across hers before she saw him.
Doesn’t any of this freak you out? Kami asked.
No, said Jared. You are the source of everything for me. Why should magic be any different?
Sometimes I feel like I don’t know the shape of myself without you, Kami thought. She felt almost desperate. Sometimes I feel like you don’t know the shape of yourself.
“I know what I’d be.”
She looked up when Jared spoke. His jaw was tight, his eyes lowered: his hair falling on his brow, his lowered lashes a fringe of shadow on his cheekbones. The sunlight struck his hair and made it burn gold, but his face was all shadow.
“You wouldn’t be like your father,” Kami said. “You wouldn’t be like them.” She opened her mind to Jared. She tried to make it like opening a book so he could see her faith as clear as carmine and gold glowing on a page.
Who in the world would believe that but you? Jared asked. And how would I know you believed it, without this?
“You could trust me,” said Kami.
I do trust you, Jared told her. But I don’t understand why you want this gone. Kami felt the struggle in him and saw him swallow. He spoke painfully aloud again. “Is it something I did? I can—”
“No, Jared,” Kami said. No.
Confused pain radiated from him. Kami wasn’t sure if he was angry at her or at himself; she supposed it hardly mattered. That was the problem. Kami looked about the autumn garden, ruby and gold leaves making the trees look as if they were hung with treasure. She looked back at Jared. She saw the way he fit into this scene, as he had fit into the woods the first time he had stood by the Crying Pools, joking with her about the Sorrier River.
The Sorrier River, of course, was the sorcerer’s river. Sorry-in-the-Vale was sorcery in the vale. This place had been made and meant for him, so perfect that living in a city was like poison to him, while this place sent power coursing through his veins. She had access to that power now. According to Rob, she had control over it. She could reach out and touch it, the same way she could touch his mind. Except that she didn’t want to.
“I meant what I told you,” she said slowly. “By the Crying Pools. If I could go back, if I could change everything, I wouldn’t. I would never want to lose you.”
Relief washed through him, though confusion lingered. “So—”
“We can’t lose each other now,” said Kami. “I know you’re real, and you know I am, so we won’t lose each other. I think it would be worth listening to what your uncle has to say. I’m not saying I want to do it. I’m saying it might be worth considering.”
Jared’s voice was blistering. “Being cut in two?”
“Being individuals for a change!” Kami said, her voice low. “Being alone, for once in our lives.” She pushed off the garden wall and stepped away from Jared, watching her shadow slide away from his, while building walls in her mind, forbidding him to pass.
Jared looked up at her as she moved away, his eyes pale and disturbing as they always were in the grip of intense emotion. She knew that now, had learned him by heart well enough to recognize the color, like seeing a gray sky turn storm white through a pane of glass.
She looked at his face, the shadows and angles of him, and had such a vivid thought that she could almost imagine she was acting on it: walking to him across the waving grass, feeling his body, so separate and so different from her own against hers, muscles and sinews shifting against hers. She imagined her fingers on the warm nape of his neck, drawing his head down.
Only she could not do it with all her feelings laid out before him: this would not just be her telling a guy how she felt with no assurance of a return. There would be no way for her to escape afterward. Human beings were not meant to be bound together like this. She did not know how to bear it.