Untold (29 page)

“You came,” Kami said at last.

Henry smiled, a shy and slightly nervous smile. “I did,” he said. “I had to. You—you sounded as if you were in real trouble.”

“Oh, we are. Thank you,” said Kami as the others drew level with them.

Henry’s gaze skittered warily over the faces of Jared and Ash, the Lynburns. Appreciation flickered briefly in his eyes when he saw Angela and Holly, who were sort of overwhelming placed side by side, but his eyes were dragged back to the Lynburns. Kami wondered just what Rob had done to him to scare him so badly.

Ash absorbed the situation at a glance and took charge of it gracefully. “Welcome to Aurimere,” he said, extending his hand, making a bloody boy in a dusty road seem like a lord greeting an honored guest. “I can’t express how glad we are to see you.”

Henry hesitated, but accepted Ash’s hand and faintly returned his smile. It was very hard to resist Ash’s charm when he turned it full on, Kami thought, even when you knew that he was playing you.

“Hey, man,” Rusty said, seeming to note this was an important occasion and giving Henry a sleepy grin. “Who are you again?”

“You must stay at Aurimere,” Ash said, sweeping away the awkward pause. “You and everyone you have brought with you. You’re all friends of Aurimere now. You’re most welcome.”

There was a much more awkward pause then. Henry looked at them all as if he was so sorry.

He did not have to say a word. They all stood there on the path to Aurimere, silent and huddled together against the cold realization that Henry had come alone: that Rob was coming tomorrow, and there would be nobody to help them.

PART VI

STORM CLOUDS GATHER

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

This is the poem of the air, Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair. . . .

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Chapter Twenty-Four

Farewell Fear

Lillian took Henry’s news without turning a hair.

“I asked everyone I could think of,” Henry said, standing humbly by the mantel in the drawing room. “People I didn’t know, that my mother had only heard about. Everybody said that Sorry-in-the-Vale makes its own laws and should be left to itself.”

“That much is true,” Lillian murmured.

Henry looked like a tradesman summoned in to hear the lady of the manor’s pleasure. Kami could envision him twisting his cap between his hands.

“All the sorcerers I’ve been in touch with, we don’t have much power. We don’t have traditions or official records. There are a few powerful families, but they keep to themselves. We don’t have a community of sorcerers like you do.”

“Because this community is working out so well,” Kami said.

Lillian turned her ice-gray gaze on Kami. “This is sorcerers’ business.”

“Anything that’s my business is Kami’s business,” Jared said. He was leaning against the wall, and had nodded at Rusty and Ash to join him; they were standing on either side of him.

Kami had not realized quite what he was doing until she tilted her head and saw him from the angle Lillian was seeing him: he, Ash, and Rusty had formed a team behind Henry, having his back.

“We have no time,” Kami said. “We’re all in this together, because we all suffer if Rob wins. You’re going to have to put up with me. I’m not going away.”

Lillian’s hair was loose for a change, and she looked tired, eyes sunken in her face. It made her look frighteningly like Rosalind. “Fine,” she said. “We have to make a contingency plan anyway.”

Ash started. “Mother, what do you mean?”

“If Rob wins,” said Lillian. “I’m not saying that he will. Of course he won’t. But it is only sensible to have a backup plan. If he wins, I’ll be dead.”

“Mom!” The word seemed ripped from Ash.

“Don’t call me that, Ash,” Lillian snapped. “I’ll be dead; we both have to face that. Rob crosses the threshold of Aurimere and takes the town over my dead body. That is the responsibility I inherited from my mother; that is the bargain of our town. Before I surrender Sorry-in-the-Vale, I will die. And I cannot allow the only Lynburns left to be Rob and Rosalind. So you and Jared cannot take part in the battle tomorrow. You have to get out of Sorry-in-the-Vale and gather your resources; then you can come back and crush him.”

She sat down in one of the high-backed gold chairs, crossing her legs and turning her face away from her son. There was another hush among the group, as there had been when they realized that Henry had come alone. It sank in for all of them that Lillian had basically told them that she believed she was going to lose.

Lillian looked around the room. “Where are the others? The Prescott girl and the good-looking one?”

“Baby,” said Rusty, “I’m right here.”

Lillian gave him a horrified look, then bent her gaze on Kami, who said, “Holly and Angela are talking to some of the sorcerers who haven’t chosen a side yet. You told us that we were excluded from your plans, so we made our own.”

Under Lillian’s gaze, Kami wished she had sat on one of the high-backed gold chairs as well, though Lillian’s head would still have been well above hers, and Lillian would still have been able to look down her nose. However, Kami felt she would have had more dignity than she currently did, sitting small and alone, practically lost in a slightly cracked leather sofa.

Jared broke ranks behind Henry and strode over to Kami, crossing the room under her startled gaze. She thought he was coming to sit beside her, but instead he slung himself to the floor and sat at her feet, one arm clasped loose around his drawn-up knee and his head bent toward her. She could have reached out and ruffled his hair.

Lillian looked both taken aback and displeased. Kami was a little taken aback herself, but she supposed it was a gesture aimed at Lillian, and she touched his shoulder lightly in thanks. “If I said that I was ready to hear your plans now . . . ,” Lillian proposed, her face impassive.

“I haven’t been holding back to punish you,” Kami said helplessly. “We’ve been practicing how to fight more effectively against sorcerers. I’ve been trying to find out about Matthew Cooper, and Elinor and Anne Lynburn, because they were able to defend the town once.”

“Against some ordinary king’s pathetic soldiers,” Lillian sneered.

Henry stared at her, as the only one who was unused to Lillian acting as if she lived in the 1700s. Then he looked away, at his own hands, twisting them together against the white stone of the mantelpiece, where flowers and drowning women tangled together in a marble river.

“It was brave of you to come,” Kami told him. “Alone, and for strangers. We all owe you more than we could ever repay.”

“Let’s show Henry to his room,” Ash suggested

Henry looked grateful for the reprieve. They walked toward the door, sweeping him away in their rush.

“You could always come back to our place if you don’t fancy Aurimere,” Rusty suggested.

“That’s okay,” Henry said, giving Rusty a look of relief that there was another guy around that wasn’t a Lynburn. “But, er, thank you. So I gather things aren’t going terribly well?” His green eyes, unexpectedly bright behind his glasses, sought Kami’s.

“Not terribly,” she said. She felt distant, part of her still in the next room with Lillian, remembering her talk with businesslike valor about a last stand. “This is so stupid,” she exclaimed. “We can’t go out there with less than half the amount of sorcerers Rob has and try to face him down in the town square. We need to take Rob and the others by surprise.”

Henry blinked three times in quick succession. Kami looked away from him, let her eyes slide to where they wanted to go and catch on Jared’s face. He was already looking at her.

“Let’s go,” Jared said.

Kami smiled back at him, a current of excitement passing between them.

Ash said heavily, “My mother would never agree.”

They all knew it was true. She was set on her sorcerers’ battle, on a display of strength before the town. They had a better chance with Lillian than without her, and the very few sorcerers they had would follow Lillian’s lead.

“Well,” said Kami, “at the very least, we need to make sure all Lillian’s sorcerers have the advantages we can give them. Holly and Angela are on it, but we need to all be talking to them. We need to give them the bags we made. Ash should take the ladies, because he’s charming.”

Ash looked pleased. Jared raised his eyebrows.

“Are you saying that I’m not a charmer?”

“You are very dear to me, but you have all the savoir faire of a wildebeest,” Kami told him.

“A wildebeest,” Jared repeated.

“A dashingly handsome wildebeest,” Kami assured him. “Now let’s go call on some sorcerers. Bring me a revolution.”

She looked away from him and saw Rusty’s glance from her to Jared, alert for a moment. The Lynburn boys withdrew in opposite directions, while Kami sidled over to Rusty.

“Don’t look at me like you know something,” she said. “You don’t know something.”

“I know many things,” Rusty told her. “I am a very great genius. I’m going to go charm some people too. I may not be a Lynburn, but I am the most charming mofo in town.” He gave her a hug and said, “Take care of yourself, Cambridge,” in an unusually serious way.

For a moment she thought he was warning her about Jared, but then she realized that this could be one of the last times they saw each other. Rusty smoothed a hand down Kami’s hair and she hugged him back, and could not watch as he left. She looked away instead, and caught Henry’s eye.

“You seem to have a lot of friends,” Henry said, a little wistfully. “Must be nice. Being a—what I am—it’s hard to get close to people. I always thought that Sorry-in-the-Vale, where magic was an open secret, I thought that it would be amazing. Meeting a Lynburn, sorcerers who can do things like in the stories, I thought it would be like meeting a legend.”

“Ah,” said Kami. “Sorry about Lillian, then.”

Henry smiled, a slight smile that disappeared almost as soon as it was born. “She’s a lot better than Rob,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it when he called me and asked me to come to Sorry-in-the-Vale. I thought he was going to show me something wonderful. And instead he killed a helpless animal in front of me. He told me all magic ended in blood.” Henry shivered as if he was back in that night, watching his dreams turn to ash and blood. “I don’t want to believe that about sorcery,” he said. “I don’t want to believe that about myself. I mean, I’m a vegetarian.”

Kami laughed quietly, but not to mock him. “I know about magic that is nothing like that,” she said. “And I know a few sorcerers. They’re just people who can do an extra thing. All right, a high percentage of them seem to be lunatics, but I think that’s down to being Lynburns and seriously inbred.”

Henry laughed in his turn, a quick startled laugh. “I thought there must be something else to magic besides the blood,” he said. “I wanted to prove that there was. And then you called.”

“And you proved it,” Kami told him, and patted his arm. “I’m sorry about hitting you with a chair, Henry. You’re good people.”

Henry shrugged, minimally. “I’m sorry for threatening your friend with a gun.” He looked around and added, “This is some place, Aurimere. My mother had never seen it, but she and her friend who was a sorcerer, they used to talk about it. Like you’d talk about Camelot.”

They both looked around then: at the hall outside the library with its dark carved doors, the glass windows stained crimson and white, and the shining flight of stairs that led up to the ebony- and ivory-inlaid representation of a woman by a pool. It was imposing, terrifying, and sometimes beautiful, but it did not look like a place where good things happened. There was so much of Aurimere, like the sorcerers’ magic, that was tainted.

Neither of them had mentioned the fact that Henry might have come here to die, that Rob might have been right after all. This magic might well end in blood.

* * *

Even though she was supposed to call Mrs. Thompson Aunt Ingrid, Holly had always been slightly afraid of her. Not for any reason, just in the way kids are of old people, the span of a whole lifetime stretching between the two points where they stood.

She was trying not to be afraid as she crossed the threshold of the sweetshop where “Aunt Ingrid” worked. She was mostly succeeding, because Angie was with her.

It was much more difficult to be scared with Angela striding at your side. It became less difficult when Holly saw that with Mrs. Thompson was Ms. Dollard, the headmistress of their school.

Holly was okay at school, and actually good at some subjects, but she always felt like Ms. Dollard thought that was a fluke and was studying Holly’s clothes to see what she was wearing that was against regulations. Kami talked to Ms. Dollard like she was a friend, and Angie stared through her as if she was a nuisance. Holly didn’t know how they dared.

Especially since now it seemed that Ms. Dollard was a sorceress.

“Well, hello,” Angie drawled. “Having a little conference about the evil taking over our town? Have the words ‘We’re totally screwed’ come up yet?”

“Angela Montgomery, don’t talk like that,” said Ms. Dollard. Her dark hair, streaked with gray, was in a short bob, and she wore expensive earrings: she didn’t look so different from when they were in school, except that she was wearing jeans. “And don’t interfere with things that don’t concern you.”

Mrs. Thompson—Aunt Ingrid—said nothing, but her eyes on Angie were not friendly. Surprise and fear burst in Holly at the same time: a new feeling, not being scared for herself but very specifically for someone else.

Angie was a stranger in Sorry-in-the-Vale, and she had no magic.

Holly put a hand on Angie’s wrist, soothing and restraining and on her side all at once. “Doesn’t this concern all of us, Aunt Ingrid?” she asked, using the name very deliberately. “We want to help.”

“How can you?” Aunt Ingrid asked.

Angela slipped her wrist out of Holly’s hold and strode across the floor. She walked like Lillian Lynburn, but Lillian had magic and Aurimere at her back. All Angie had was defiance of the whole world, but she made it work. Nobody could look anywhere else as she tossed two small dark bags, tied with twine, on the countertop.