People mistook Emma for my mother all the time. Children, mostly, and out-of-towners—people who didn’t know what had happened to my parents, or that as Whimsy’s physician Emma had been the one who’d tried to save my father’s life and failed. Unlike my mother, he hadn’t died instantly. To all accounts, it would have been better if he had.
So I suppose I couldn’t stay angry at Emma for her vices, even when they occasionally made me her keeper rather than the other way around. A patient must have died today, though I’d long ago stopped asking once I’d made the connection. Most of all, I could never forget I was the reason she was still in Whimsy. If it hadn’t been for me, the responsibility of raising her sister’s daughter, the child of the man who died in her arms, she would have left for the World Beyond as soon as she could. In a place where enchantments reigned supreme and the creatures who traded them had no use for human medicine . . . well, her ideal life lay elsewhere.
Emma was missing something too, and I’d do well to remember that.
“Can you take your shoes off?” I asked, lowering her to the edge of her bed.
“?’M all right,” she replied with her eyes closed, so I did it anyway, and tucked them under the bed skirt so she wouldn’t trip on them if she got up during the night. Afterward, I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
Her eyes squinted open. They were dark brown, almost black, like mine—large and intense. She had the same freckles spattered across her fair skin and the same thick, wheat-colored hair. Before everything happened, I remember her and my mother joking that the women in our family reigned supreme: they passed their looks down without any input from the men whatsoever.
“I’m sorry about Rook,” she said, reaching up to give a strand of my identical hair an affectionate tug.
I froze. My mind reeled, teetering at the edge of a precipice. “I don’t know what—”
“Isobel, I’m not blind. I knew what was going on.”
Acid soured my stomach. My voice came out thin and tight, prepared to rise stridently in defense. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Her hand flopped down to the coverlet. “Because I couldn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. I trusted you to make the right choice.” Lanced with guilt in the face of Emma’s understanding, my hostility deflated. Somehow the emptiness it left behind felt far, far worse. “Also, I worry about you. Your Craft keeps you so busy and isolated you haven’t had a chance to experience . . . well, so many things. We’d have a hard time getting by without the enchantments. But I wish—”
A thump shook the ceiling, followed by a maniacal cackle. I welcomed the interruption. The more Emma spoke, the harder I wrestled with the tears prickling the backs of my eyes.
“Oh, hell. The twins.” Her voice scraped like sandpaper. She gave the rafters a resigned look.
I rose swiftly. “Don’t worry. I’ll check on them.”
The old stairway to the attic creaked beneath my weight. When I entered the twins’ bedroom, a tiny slope-ceilinged nook barely large enough for two beds and a dresser, they’d already initiated a pretend sleep routine, which wouldn’t have fooled me even without the stifled giggling.
“I know you’re plotting something. Out with it.” I went over to May and tickled her. Rarely did she confess without torture.
“March!” she shrieked, thrashing beneath the covers. “March wants to show you something!”
I relented, and regarded March with my hands on my hips, trying to look stoic. Judging by the way her cheeks were ballooned out, she was about to squirt water all over my face or possibly something even less pleasant. I couldn’t show weakness. I tapped my foot and raised an impatient eyebrow.
“Bleeeghhh,” she said, and ejected a live toad onto her quilt.
I shook my head at May’s hysterical laughter. “Well, at least you didn’t swallow it,” I reasoned, lunging after the moist and traumatized creature. I snatched it before it made a bid for freedom down the stairwell. “Now settle down, all right? Emma’s having one of her nights.” They didn’t know what this meant, only that it was serious, and I’d think of some way to bribe them for being on their best behavior.
“Fine,” May sighed, flopping over in bed. She watched me with one eye. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Put it somewhere far away from March’s mouth.” And hope it recovers from the nightmares, I thought, shutting the door behind me.
I drifted through the house, moonlight making foreign shapes of the parlor’s clutter. A half-finished Vervain smiled at me coldly from the easel, wearing an expression that might as well have been carved onto a wigmaker’s mannequin. Working with her came as a shock after Rook, even though I knew she was only a return to normality, whatever that meant in my case.
I crept through the kitchen and outside onto the damp grass, where I set the toad free. It sprang away into the weeds, toward the forest. From here, across the moon-silvered field, the tops of the trees poked above the horizon like a cloud bank.
A breeze stirred the wheat and sighed through the grass, chilling the dew on my toes. The wind blew from the forest’s direction and for a moment I imagined I caught a whisper of that crisp, wild, wistful smell, Rook’s smell, the one that seized my heart and wouldn’t let go. I knew what it was. Autumn.
All at once my chest swelled with unnameable longing, an ache lodged at the base of my throat like an unvoiced cry. Lives to be lived awaited me out there, far from the safety of my familiar home and confining routine. The whole world waited for me. I felt pierced through with longing. Oh, if only I were the type to scream.
I wiped my toady hands off on the grass and stepped back.
A fluttering of wingbeats came from the old oak.
I turned, the breeze lifting my hair, and saw a raven in the tree. But which was it—a raven for peril, or a raven I loved?
Before I could move, Rook stood over me. I only had time to think, Both. For this wasn’t the Rook I knew. As the feathers shed from his form and gathered into a sweeping coat, they revealed a face livid with fury. No half-smile softened this hard, frozen mask, those amethyst eyes burning like conflagrations.
“What did you do?” he snarled.
Five
ROOK’S BEWILDERING question chilled me to the core. Mutely, I shook my head. I needed to get inside.
Anticipating my move, he crowded me against the side of the house and pinned me there. He didn’t touch me, but a clear threat radiated from the arms bracketing my shoulders, the strong hands gripping the wood beside my face. With escape eliminated as an option I found I couldn’t look away from him. His normally expressive mouth was compressed into a thin, bloodless line as he waited for me to answer. I would have welcomed any change in his icy expression, even for the worse, to give me some indication of what was going through his head.
“Rook, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, sounding as daunted as I felt. “I haven’t done anything.”
He drew up to his full height. I’d forgotten how tall he was—I could barely tip my head back far enough to see him. “Stop playing the fool. I know you sabotaged the portrait. Why? Are you working for another fair one? What did they give you to betray me?”