Freddy stayed prudently silent.
“They’ll come looking for you because they think you have information,” said Josiah. “When they notice you missing—which will be very soon—they’ll panic. They’ll be sure we’re making our move. Whichever one it is will be desperate for help.”
“She does have information,” said Cuerva Lachance, beaming towards the bright spot of light that wasn’t quite the sun.
“She … what?” said Josiah.
“She knows, or she will soon. I remember being Ban. I gave her hints,” said Cuerva Lachance.
Josiah gaped at her. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Cuerva Lachance, rubbing her hat in a puzzled sort of way. “High spirits?”
He scrambled back to his feet. “But then—”
“Why do you think I said we should call her in?” said Cuerva Lachance. “It’s not a bluff. A day more and she’d have spilled the beans to Three. She is the key.”
Freddy didn’t feel like the key. She didn’t know … did she? Could it be she really had all the clues she needed? She’d thought maybe she was getting closer earlier, after Roland had panicked and run home across the park, but she hadn’t put the clues together yet. Why had she held things back from Mel? Was Josiah right that she’d just been trying to make herself important?
She shoved aside the growing shame. At least Cuerva Lachance and Josiah had finally admitted there was something to find out. “I don’t know what you think I know—” she started.
“Save it. You’re not going to catch us that way,” said Josiah, “obviously. You’re less cunning than you think you are.”
I doubt it, thought Freddy, keeping her face stony. And I’m more imaginative than you think I am. One of the things she’d noticed about Josiah was that he wasn’t particularly good at figuring out when people were hiding things. Everything about him was out there on the surface, and he assumed everything about everybody else was, too. Cuerva Lachance knew about hiding things, but she didn’t really pay attention, and she missed details. Josiah thought Freddy was less cunning than she thought she was and less imaginative than she thought she was, but really, it was he and Cuerva Lachance who were less powerful than they thought they were—
That was it. That was the beginning of the answer. She was sure it was. She couldn’t let on that she knew.
“I’m not cunning,” said Freddy. “I have no idea what you mean.”
Cuerva Lachance, looking straight up at the sky, said, “Then why don’t you want to tell us who Three is?”
“Because I do know you haven’t told me everything,” said Freddy. “It’s all less … innocent than you say it is. I just don’t know why.”
“She knows,” said Cuerva Lachance, beaming.
“We can’t give her a chance to tell them,” said Josiah.
“Of course not,” said Cuerva Lachance. “But I was a Girl Guide once. I came prepared.”
Freddy felt the rock shift behind her head. A second later, something else had shot out of it and around towards her face. She tried to pull herself away from it but couldn’t. Desperately, Freddy clamped her mouth shut. It didn’t do any good. Tendrils of … whatever it was … forced themselves between her lips, then her teeth. She felt her jaw being winched open, and she choked, but the tendrils stopped before they reached her throat, instead weaving themselves into a ball within her mouth. More tendrils fused together over her lips, gagging her. The gag held her head to the rock as firmly as the rope did her torso.
“Breathe through your nose,” said Josiah. “If Three comes through, nobody’s going to get hurt.”
If she got free, she thought, she would hurt him. It was the first time in her life she had ever sympathised with Keith. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance walked away behind the rock. She tried to shout after them, but her voice came out muffled and weak. A moment later, she was alone in the house on Grosvenor Street, in a part of it that couldn’t have existed.
*
Time passed. She had nothing to do but think, so think she did. If she couldn’t accomplish anything else, she could solve the puzzle.
The thought she’d had before had been about power. She was sure Cuerva Lachance and Josiah weren’t as powerful as they seemed. Cuerva Lachance could … well, she could do this to the house on Grosvenor Street. Josiah could stop her from doing this, which was a different sort of power. They did influence the world. They did, somehow, balance each other out. But there was something skewed about the way they presented themselves and their relationship with Three. Something backwards.
Backwards.
Tied firmly to her rock, straining to draw enough air into her lungs, Freddy remembered. Ban. Ban had said everything was backwards. Maybe Freddy should have been thinking along those lines, but she hadn’t trusted Ban. And yet there were other clues, too, things that were inconsequential in and of themselves but that resonated with that idea of backwardness. Freddy drew a shallow breath in, let it out. Ban in the jungle: The girl is, as you put it, Three, though that’s a bit of a misnomer, I should say. Mika telling the story, seeming to call Cuerva Lachance and Josiah out of the air as she did. Other tiny things, hardly noticeable. Ban saying Three’s uncle thought she had been calling down demons. The boy in the cave being visited by Māui. Sam Coleridge annoying Josiah by steadfastly refusing to see him as anything but a fairy. Bragi standing up to Loki in the hall. Filbert avoiding the question of where the future Josiah and Cuerva Lachance were, holding her knowledge, whatever it was, effortlessly over Josiah’s head.
Freddy blinked and nearly forgot to breathe, though she desperately needed more air. Everything was backwards. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah acted as if they were the ones with the power, but they weren’t, were they? It was Three. It seemed they were the dominant ones, but they couldn’t have been. Three shouldn’t even have been called Three. Mika had been able to control them; she had been One. Calling her—him—Three was just another misdirection.
They want the Threes to think of themselves as inferior, thought Freddy. As third, not first. Why?
“Have you got it yet?” asked Ban, poking her head up out of the sand. Freddy glowered down at her.
“Yes,” said Ban, “of course she knows I’m here, but she also knows I don’t stay to help. I’m just popping in for the sake of drama. I have no idea how this is all going to turn out. I’m sure it will be very exciting.”
Freddy thought inaudible swear words at Ban. She was getting tired of being surrounded by impossible people.
“If I helped,” said Ban, “she would remember helping, and she would come around the rock and stop me. So I can only urge you to hurry up. Time is passing; the others will be here soon.”