She did. Jonathan relaxed, sinking to his haunches, and Katie suddenly remembered that he was only a year older than she was. For a few moments there, the gap had felt like decades.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she said.
He looked up and smiled. Katie had to look away, for the smile was brilliant, almost blinding in its goodwill. For a moment she wanted to beg his forgiveness. Again she thought of that night in her backyard, sitting beside Tear on the bench and realizing that she would do whatever he might ask. The Tears were dangerous people, but theirs was not a danger of knives.
“Thank you,” said Jonathan.
Katie looked at her watch. She should have been at the sheep farm long ago, but something in her still hesitated, and when she identified that hesitation, it stunned her: she was waiting to be dismissed.
“Go,” Jonathan told her, and Katie stumbled toward the edge of the clearing. Her mind would not quite focus, and her skin was puckered with gooseflesh. It was the way she imagined trees felt after being struck by a bolt of lightning.
She looked back, but Jonathan had already vanished. Katie turned and continued on her way, cutting steadily eastward, looking for the path that wrapped around the slope, the path that would take her back to the Hill Road. She eventually found it, but that lightning-struck feeling persisted.
What happened? she demanded, though she knew she would get no answers. What happened to me back there?
She didn’t know, but one fact, at least, had solidified in her mind: she now had another secret to keep. Not from the Town—that was easy—but from Row. Another secret to divide them, and Katie felt the wedge drive a bit deeper into her mind: Tear and Row, so distant now that they might as well have been on opposite sides of a ravine, and where did Katie plant her flag?
I can be both! she insisted, but even in her mind her voice was shrill, the high, anxious tone of someone covering a lie.
Tapping.
Katie woke abruptly from a dream of flight, and found herself in darkness. The tapping continued, and for a moment she felt her dream morph, smoothly and seamlessly, as dreams often did, into something new, a poem Mum had read to her when she was young. There was a raven outside, tapping away, and Katie could not open her window. Only madness waited there.
Another soft set of taps. She realized that she was awake, that the sound was real fingers on her window, a large board that Mum had built to swing outward on hinges. Unlike the glass windows in her books, this window was only opaque wood, and Katie could not see what was out there.
Nothing, her mind whispered. Nothing good. Ignore it and go back to sleep.
But the tapping could not be ignored. In fact, it was beginning to increase, both in speed and volume, and soon it would wake Mum. Katie took a deep breath, reminded herself that she was a fierce animal, drew the bolt, and cracked the window.
Row was crouched beneath the windowsill, his dark eyes peeping up at her in the moonlight.
“Bundle up and come on.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Out.”
“What time is it?” She fumbled on her bedside table for her watch.
“Two thirty.” Row held up a black, shapeless mass. “I brought us cloaks. I figure in these, we should be able to pass as grown-ups.”
Katie didn’t move. Every instinct in her body told her not to go, yet there was a terrible fascination in the darkness behind Row. He could break the rules and not get in trouble. But Katie wasn’t as brave.
Row smiled. “Why not? You know me, Katie; I never get caught.”
She drew back, suddenly chilled, remembering the moment that afternoon with Jonathan Tear. Could anyone read her mind now? She looked at Row suspiciously, wondering if he had been holding back on her all these years.
“Did you—”
“I know you, Rapunzel. When have we ever needed magic to read each other’s minds?”
That was true. Sometimes the two of them achieved such perfect simpatico that they didn’t need to talk at all.
“What are you afraid of, anyway?” Row demanded, crossing both arms on her windowsill. “Me?”
No, not Row precisely, but Katie couldn’t explain. As always, what Row offered was dark and wild and off-limits: the night outside her window. If she got caught out after curfew, her punishment wouldn’t end with Mum. It would go all the way to William Tear. He might even take her off the guard.
“Why are you even here?” she demanded. “What about Mia?”
Row shrugged, an entire conversation that Katie read easily. He might be sleeping with Mia Gillon this week, but Mia would wait, just as all the women in town seemed to wait on Row. He had his choice of beds, and he made good use of them, but none of the women mattered. Katie found the idea comforting. The magic circle that had surrounded the two of them since childhood was solid, far too solid to be broken by anyone as ridiculous as Mia Gillon.
Row leaned in even farther, dangling the cloak in front of her. “Last chance, Rapunzel.”
With fingers that were not quite steady, she took the cloak. “I have to get dressed.”