“My vote as well,” Miss Fennell said huskily. “Which makes it a majority, regardless of Westgate’s choice. We cannot choose safety over hope anymore.”
For her, it should have been a moment of unalloyed victory. But her face twisted with grief as she looked at her defeated cousin and mentor, and when she looked across to Miss Banks linking arms with Miss Stewart—the two young women leaning into each other as they shared their magical strength—a flash of raw fear crossed her strong features.
With her mentor’s sudden loss of power, her own path to the Boudiccate was suddenly in question. Perhaps it was natural that she would doubt everything else, too, at such a moment.
I had faith in her future, for I knew the quiet strength of her fiancée’s will. But it would be up to the two of them to sort out their romance once this inspection was safely over...and even as I thought that, I heard a sound that was only too familiar: Gregory Luton’s voice, raised in mid-lecture.
“...Inmyopinion, if the fey and the weather wizards worked more closely together—ah. Are we here already?”
“Finally,” said my brother drily, and stepped into the circle of light, pushing a wheelbarrow laden with more than mere books.
Every volume of Romulus Harwood’s journal lay piled there—and a wooden chest I’d never seen sat there, as well.
“The journals were sent to Thornfell’s library,” Jonathan told me, “but this chest was stored in Harwood House’s attic, full of everything else that Romulus left behind. We’ve been storing it all these decades as a family record...but it seems to me that someone else deserves it more.
“Madam.” He gave my captor a deep, respectful bow. “I believe that all of these belong to you.”
Slowly, painfully, the fey woman’s fingers unclenched from my arm. As fresh air stung the open wounds, I bit down hard on my tongue...and forced myself to wait.
“Show me,” she said, her voice rough. In the undergrowth around us, green vines slithered and snapped in a restless, undulating motion.
Jonathan scooped up the journal he’d laid at the very top of the pile, and flipped open to a page he’d marked.
“Met with my beloved, spinning dreams together. I brought her the ivy I’d cultivated in a potte all winter, and—”
A sob ripped out of her throat as she lunged forward, snatching for the book with her hands as her vines lunged from the grass and bluebells to wrap themselves around the wheelbarrow full of memories. Thorns poked out from every angle like barbed warnings to anyone who’d dare try to steal them from her.
Her long fingernails were red with my blood. Her green and orange eyes were inhuman.
But the tears that glimmered in them, as she turned over the next page in the journal with careful, spindly fingers, were as familiar to me as my own soul.
“It’s him,” she said softly. “You brought him to me. You brought him back.”
“He never stopped loving you,” Jonathan replied just as quietly. “You’ll see that in his journals. Harwoods never abandon their partners.”
The fey woman didn’t answer for a long moment. Finally, she looked up from the faded pages to meet his gaze. “You have his eyes,” she told him. “They were always kind eyes. They were gentle—and they were the first, of any kind, to truly see me.”
Taking a step backward, she pressed the journal to her chest, her sharp-thorned vines dragging the wheelbarrow along with her into the bluebells. “You gave me these,” she said. “I’ll give you something in return. You’ll never be in danger from me or any other fey in these woods again unless you try to steal these back from me.”
Amy stepped up beside her husband, tucking her hand into the curve of his arm. “We apologize,” she said, “for the hurt that you endured. But we are happy to give you everything we have of his now—and we hope that we mayallmove forward.” Pointedly, she glanced past the other woman at me. “If you would?”
“We gave you yours,” I said hoarsely. “Now I need mine.”
Ifhe was still breathing.
If I wasn’t too late.
If I hadn’t wasted—
No. I hadn’t wasted the hours of this day. Without today’s lessons, we would never be here now, lit by the glow of my students’ combined magic. Amy had been right: I could never have succeeded on my own. I could have killed my enemy and myself, both at once, with one final, brutal spell—but I couldn’t havesavedanyone at all.
Thattook all of us, working together and yanking aside the old prejudices that had blinded all of us and kept us apart.
The fey woman looked at me with eyes that had seen deep into my dreams. “You won’t see me again,” she said, “but I’ll see you, Cassandra Harwood. I’ll watch Thornfell and keep it safe as long as you protect my woods. And I won’t keep your own love from you any longer.”
With a click of her long, branch-like fingers, the thickly-layered vines began to writhe around the tree behind her. The ends rushed back towards her as I rushed towards the tree...
And she was gone, vanishing into the bluebell-covered ground, by the time I reached it.
