In Lillian’s desperation, because of her overwhelming arrogance, because she had good intentions, she thought it was all right to take Kami’s little brother. She thought she had the right.
“Dad,” Kami said, holding Tomo’s hand, “you have to stay here with Tomo. I have to go get Ten.”
“I forbid you to leave this house,” Dad told her, his voice angry enough that it made Kami swallow. “One of my kids is already in danger. You two both have to stay here. I’m going.”
“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. “Where’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.