“What now?” The King turned his attention to the quaking sugar teeth. “Well. I suppose we ought to unmagic them.”
He left the room. Some minutes later, he arrived again and shut the door behind him. In his stiff hand, he held the old, mottled silver sword. He gazed at the sugar teeth, lost in thought.
“Unmagic,” said Azalea, turning the odd word in her mouth. “You’ll take the magic from it?”
“Just so.”
The girls watched, rapt, as he gently and solemnly lowered the sword to the sugar teeth. He touched the silver to silver with a soft clink.
As quick and quiet as a snuffed candle, the sugar teeth…lost their luster. They looked the same, but…Azalea couldn’t describe it. No longer shuddering, the teeth somehow seemed at peace. Everyone exhaled silently.
“Well,” said the King. He picked up the teeth and slipped them into his waistcoat pocket, as delicately as a lifeless sparrow to be buried. He turned to the girls.
“What did your mother do?” he said.
“Sir?”
“When it was time for bed,” said the King. “Tell me.”
The girls exchanged nervous glances. He was talking about Mother.
“She used to help the girls with their prayers,” said Azalea, hesitant. “And—sometimes she would read stories.”
The King set the sword on the table, next to the vase.
“Very well,” he said as the girls whispered to one another. “I will read you a story.”
The whispering stopped.
Jessamine slid from her bed to the ground, the untied purple ribbons of her slippers trailing, and dug a storybook out from Eve’s trunk. She held it out to the King in her tiny four-year-old hands, her crystal blue eyes hopeful.
The King sat on the rug and leaned against Delphinium and Eve’s bed, and the younger girls shyly sat next to him, peering at the pictures. Clover smiled, her right dimple showing, and hugged Lily to her chest while Bramble, sitting on her pouf, cast a wry, surprised grin at Azalea.
“‘In a certain country…’” he began, his voice stiff with the words.
He read the stories of “Hans and Gretchen,” “The Goats of Hemland Shire,” “The Dainty Princess.” He wasn’t like Mother, who read with all the voices and a bubbled laugh at the words, but…he was all right. Everything felt warm and safe, among the linens, the flickering fire, and coziness of their room.
The girls’ eyes grew heavy, and their heads drooped. The King himself grew drowsy, his voice reading slower and slower, until finally he shook himself, and with Azalea’s direction, put the right girls in the right beds. Then he left with the sword and a good night.
The sword! Azalea’s mind whirred. She rolled the dry, crinkly rosebud from hand to hand across the table, sorting things out. Somehow, it was magic after all! How, Azalea did not know, but surely it had unmagicked the palace those hundreds of years ago, at the hand of Harold the First. No wonder Keeper wanted to be rid of it! It could unmagic him!
Hope humming through her, Azalea took her shawl from the peg by the door and slipped into the cold hall. She ran down the stairs, quiet in her bare feet, turning the corner into the portrait gallery. Edges of the glass cases and gold ends of the velvet ropes glimmered in the dim light, and Azalea found her way to the sword display. The King never left anything out of place, and for once Azalea was glad of it. She lifted the glass case from it and, ten minutes later, was back in her room.
None of the girls awoke as she turned up the lamp and smothered the fire in the hearth. She turned everything in her mind, over and over. She would unmagic the passage. They wouldn’t get the brooch or the watch back, but that didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was that Keeper would be rendered powerless—
Or would he? Azalea hesitated. With the blood oath—and the sword broken now—
“Shut up!” said Azalea to her thoughts. She grasped the rapier’s handle with both hands beneath the silver swirl guard cage, stepped into the fireplace, and touched the silver edge to the DE.
Nothing happened.
Nothing had happened before, of course, when the King had unmagicked the sugar teeth, but she had felt something. Something different. Now, as her excitement faded, the logical side of her mind took over.
What was she thinking? Unmagicking the passage would do nothing—Keeper couldn’t die, could he? He would still be there, along with his magic, with the addition that he would be angry. Azalea had the foreboding that he was going to be cross already, since they hadn’t come to dance. If she had truly unmagicked it, Keeper would be left with Mother’s soul—
In a panic, Azalea snatched the handkerchief from her pocket and rubbed it against the magic mark.