Jane wondered if there was something she could withhold from Dorie, but what would that be? Her meals? The child was used to having everything she wanted, just the way she wanted. And in the case of meals, that meant eating with her fey tricks—wafting food through the air to her mouth—and not with fingers or fork. Jane told Cook to start sending a set of silverware up with Dorie’s meals from now on, but so far Jane had only placed the silverware beside Dorie’s plate, and not insisted. She had not quite had the fortitude to go into that inevitable battle.
After one not-too-terrible morning of watching Dorie dance in time to the three-quarter beat of a waltz, Jane started to wonder if Dorie had any natural math ability. Sometimes children afflicted in one area were extra clever in another, Jane knew—there had been a girl at the Norwood School who could hardly speak or look you in the eye, but she could add sums with startling proficiency.
Jane brought up a jar of dried beans and tried counting. Dorie liked counting. She could count to a hundred, and Jane’s estimation of her human skills went up. But when Jane asked her about adding she shook her head. Bolstered by the good morning, Jane decided to find out what it would be like to try to teach Dorie something.
“This may be new, but I know you can do it,” said Jane. “It’s just like counting.” She had found two crystal buttons in her dresser and she brought them out now.
“Pretty,” said Dorie, and Jane perked up at this show of interest.
“Yes,” she agreed. She put the two buttons in Dorie’s palm. Dorie’s fingers did not close around them, but lay as stiff and unmoving as if her hands were porcelain. “Do you know how many buttons are here?”
“Two.”
“And how many here?” Jane put two green buttons in Dorie’s other palm.
“Two.”
Jane pushed Dorie’s hands together. “Now count how many.”
Dorie clacked and shook her head. She turned her arms till the buttons slid off her palms and clattered to the wooden floor.
“Let’s have another go.” Jane separated the buttons into two piles on the floor. “How many buttons here?”
“Two.”
“And how many in this pile?”
“Two.”
“So if you have two buttons and you add two more…”
Dorie threw the buttons across the floor in a flash of blue light.
Jane sighed and picked them up. The one that went under the white chest of drawers came back covered in dust. The other one rolled to the windowsill, and Jane saw a flash of movement through the window, a shadow disappearing into shadows, as she stooped to retrieve it. She straightened up and looked more closely.
Dorie’s window faced west into the forest. The forest was dark today; it was always dark. Grey pine, blood-dark cedar, and black briar tangled through its undergrowth. Thin strips of the silver birches the estate must have been named for glinted in the darkness, but even they looked oppressed, their branches swallowed in poisonous mistletoe. The forest stretched across the entire back of the estate and curved down its sides as if it were encroaching on the house, year by year. A creeping arm of forest came so close to the damaged north wing that Jane was not even sure if you could walk between them. The forest had a foothold it would not relinquish.
So surely she hadn’t seen a tall form slip between those thorny locusts; surely no one would choose to be swallowed up by the dark.
Jane turned away from the window, painted buttons in hand. Dorie’s chin was lifted toward the window, her perfect face expressionless and smooth. “Father,” she said calmly.
Jane looked back, but the shadow was gone—and she was pretty sure that Dorie couldn’t have seen the shadow on the ground from where she stood.
“Let’s go back to counting,” she said, but the attempt at math had gotten Dorie’s back up.
“Father,” Dorie said mutinously. “Father, father, father.”
“Perhaps he’ll be at dinner,” said Jane, though truthfully he hadn’t been down in days. She looked out the window at where she thought she had seen the figure. Was that Mr. Rochart? Of course, the man was allowed to walk around his own estate. But to deliberately go into the woods, the dark woods where the fey had lived, hidden in the twists and turns of the dark branches, inside the knotholes, between the thorns of the locusts … No, the fey had not been seen for five years, since the war ended. But they had not been openly vanquished. Merely they had disappeared one day, leaving a breathless taut waiting for the next attack that never came.
“Counting,” Jane said firmly, turning back to Dorie.
But Dorie was gone.