The Demon's Covenant

21

Bitter Fruit

Mae saw the exact moment that fury crashed through Gerald’s patience and shattered it. He lifted a hand, and wind went blasting in Nick and Alan’s direction. The other magicians took their cues from him and the murmurs of spell casting were suddenly all around, half the circle drawing back for what Mae guessed was a spot of demon summoning, the other half advancing with magic in their hands. Nick and Alan drew their weapons.

“Now,” said Mae, and grabbed Sin’s shoulder for emphasis. “Go alert your archers. Tell the rest of them to come out in the open.”

Sin’s voice sounded faint and stunned, but there was a smile in it. “If you go out,” she said, “they’ll follow you.”

Mae blinked. “Right.” She stood up and dusted off her jeans, looking helplessly at Jamie and Annabel, who stood up with her. “Right, then,” Mae said, and strode out into the market square.

Emerging from their places on the side streets at the other two points of the triangle came the Goblin Market: the woman who sold wind chimes, the man at the knife stall who’d tackled a customer, the necklace-selling pied piper with the gleaming dark eyes. The piper wasn’t holding up a trinket made of human bones this time, though. He was holding a bow and arrow, which he loosed into the midst of the magicians.

That was another signal, apparently. From the black fence surrounding the church, the gardens and towering trees, and the very roof of the church itself, there was suddenly a rain of arrows.

The magicians erupted into a counterattack. A small storm front was rising in front of them like a force field, and in the storm were crows croaking wildly to one another and being tossed about in the wind like leaves. From the center of the Obsidian Circle there sprang a wolf.

Mae took out her knife, which was seeming a bit inadequate just now, and braced herself for the onslaught.

One of the shadow creatures at Nick’s feet leaped for the wolf. Alan shot a crow.

The Ryves brothers moved to join the forces of the Goblin Market.

It took Mae a minute to realize that the three newcomers were being guarded: that she, Jamie, and Annabel were being pushed to the back of the fray.

It made sense. All Mae had was a knife, and Jamie didn’t even have that.

There was a flurry of snarls and yelps under their feet, then in the jostling, fighting crowd Mae suddenly saw faces that couldn’t have possibly been there, her father and her friends from school, and Jamie called out, “Mum, Mae, they’re illusions, don’t pay attention to them,” and Annabel struck out at one leering magician’s face only to find her sword went clean through him and was parried by Nick.

“All of you, get behind me right now!”

“No, they need me,” Mae argued.

“They needed you to make a plan,” said Nick. “They may have even needed you to lead them into this square. But they do not need you to be at the front of a fight, because you don’t know how to fight and you’ll just get in everybody’s way!”

He slashed at a crow and connected, bringing it down in a mess of blood and feathers. A pale girl with no eyes rushed for Mae, but Jamie raised his hand and she dissolved into the wind with a sound like a sigh.

Nick raised a hand and the storm died around them, so they could see four people—then five, and then six—coming at them from the narrowest side street, to the right of the town hall.

Only they weren’t people, Mae saw in a burst of magic light behind them. They were demons, eyes like black jewels shining and perfect in ruined faces. The bodies they were using were dead.

“Surprise zombies,” Jamie said faintly. “Fantastic.”

“Not really a party until someone brings the surprise zombies,” said Nick, and charged them.

The bodies moved too slowly to be much of a challenge, Mae saw, bile rising in her throat as Nick hacked his way through them, too fast for their fumbling, grasping hands to touch him, sword slicing through dead flesh and dark fluids. She saw Annabel go in after him; her impeccably behaved mother with a sword in hand and her blond hair falling wild about her shoulders, cutting down the dead.

Mae felt violently proud and violently ill at the same time.

Nick spun and beheaded the body Annabel was fighting, flashing her a savage, gleeful smile. Annabel gave him a nod.

Nick lunged in, sword just to Annabel’s left, inches away from her side, sinking the blade into a dead body and carving its stomach out. He whirled away from the pieces of the dead that were now littering the square and performed a tight circle around Mae, Jamie, and Annabel, protective but restless as well, looking for his next challenge.

The arrows had stopped hailing in from overhead; Mae thought that the Market might have run out. She couldn’t see how many magicians were down, but judging by the chaos all around them, it wasn’t many.

“Alan could probably have organized this better,” she said.

Nick flicked her a look. “Alan couldn’t have organized this at all,” he said. “Who would’ve trusted him? He’s not a leader any more than I am. You two did fine.”

“Illusion,” Jamie’s voice said behind them. “Illusion, illusion, disgusting illusion, eurgh.”

Mae found herself smiling. Praise meant a lot more when the guy couldn’t lie to you. “I’d like to see you being a war leader.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Nick. “My battle cry would be ‘For blood, vengeance, and my undeniable good looks!’”

“I’ve heard worse,” Mae said, and heard worse: heard the scream of insects, a high buzzing that made her think of plagues of locusts, of the fury of gods.

The magicians weren’t gods, though, and these weren’t locusts. They weren’t any kind of insects Mae had ever seen before, more like nightmares of insects thought up by someone who had never seen any but had heard horror stories, flying spidery things with bristles and too-big red eyes.

“How was your summer?” Jamie asked nobody in particular. “Well, I was eaten by insects from hell, and it was all downhill from there.”

Nick lunged and reeled Jamie in by his shirt collar, hand on the back of his neck, and Jamie made a face and shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, there was a curving shimmer of silver in the brown irises, like the reflection of a scythe.

The nightmare buzzing died. The insects dropped out of the air.

Jamie was suddenly breathing shudderingly hard, as if he’d just run a race. His skin looked waxy, and he had to lean against Annabel’s shoulder to stay upright. Nick looked a little pale himself.

“I can’t give you enough power,” he said. “You don’t have the magician’s sigil. I don’t know how—”

“Try me,” Mae said. “I have a mark, so maybe—”

She didn’t finish her sentence. Nick reached out to her, though, and Mae felt the magic rush through her as if the mark was a lock with a key in it, opening, as if her body was a channel with water crashing through it, sparkling and sweet and changing everything.

She lifted a hand, and a crow flying at her head suddenly stopped as if it had hit a wall, screeched and slid limp to the ground. And she knew that the magic was all gone, so quickly, leaving her a shaking and empty vessel.

“You’re not a magician,” Nick said, dragging her out of the way as another storm hit, shielding her with his body. “It’s like—it’s like filling a cup or filling a lake, there are different magic capacities.”

His eyes turned to Jamie, thoughtful, but before he could do a thing, the wolf that was really a magician came leaping at them, shreds of shadows in its teeth and a friend behind it. They hit Nick full in the chest, and his sword went flying.

Mae started toward him, but then there was another dead thing lurching at Jamie and Annabel, and Annabel was still trying to hold Jamie up. Mae ran to them instead, her shoes sliding on mess she refused to look down at, and grabbed Jamie so Annabel could swing.

“Mum is kind of badass,” Jamie said into Mae’s shoulder. “Where’s Nick?”

Mae glanced around and saw Nick thump a wolf in its snarling face with his elbow, and then palm a dagger. “He’s punching wolves.”

“Good, good,” said Jamie. “I know he likes to keep busy.”

Mae looked across the nightmarish whirl that the market square had become and saw Alan at last, in the front wave nearest to the magicians, fighting to get to them with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. She saw him hit someone in the face with his gun, so she presumed he was out of bullets.

They could lose, she thought, and then heard the moan slide out between Nick’s clenched teeth when the second wolf got its claws in his shoulder to the bone. Mae and Jamie let out a curse at about the same moment and ran to Nick just as he slit its throat.

Mae pushed aside the wolf, which was turning back into a dead man even as she touched it, and bumped heads with Jamie as they both bent over Nick. He stared up at them from the bloody bricks, eyes wide.

“Do you think his eyes are all pupil?” Jamie asked desperately, patting Nick on the shoulder that wasn’t wounded. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”

“I’m fine,” Nick snarled, and shut his eyes.

“Mae, he is not fine!” Jamie almost yelled, and Mae scrambled to her feet.

“Oh God,” she said. “Alan’s down. Alan’s down—I can’t see him. I think he could be—”

“What?” Nick rasped.

Mae looked down and saw Nick struggle up on one knee. He glared up at her and then got painfully to his feet, a knife in either hand. There was blood running down his arm, his shoulder was a mess, and his mouth was set in a grim, determined line. “Where’s Alan?”

“Oh, Alan’s fine,” said Mae, nodding to where Alan was throwing himself at the magicians again. Sin was beside him now, and the rest of the Goblin Market was behind her. “I was lying so you’d get up. Sorry about that.”

Nick laughed, spun, and stabbed something. “Don’t be sorry. I’ve just decided lying’s kind of sexy.”

Mae laughed too, but it was nervous. Nick was bleeding too much and not healing himself, he probably couldn’t heal himself, and he was going to slip in his own blood soon if he kept trying to move as if he wasn’t hurt.

Annabel was slowing down too. She stumbled, and Mae had to run and bring her knife down hard, almost severing a dead man’s hand at the wrist so it would not touch her mother.

“Where’s your brother?” Annabel panted, struggling to her feet.

Mae looked over at Jamie and saw him standing to one side of Nick, just before another stumbling demon went for Nick’s throat and Nick went down again. Mae cursed and began to struggle back toward them, a hundred illusions and enemies in her way and Annabel shouting her name.

The dead thing’s head came half off under Nick’s knives, and then Jamie was pulling it off Nick, who was really down this time. Mae could see a lot more blood.

“Nick!” she screamed, and Alan’s head turned.

He left Sin’s side and started to fight his way backward through the crowd, the knives in his hands running blood, and he was running too.

It was too late, though. Jamie was kneeling at Nick’s side and Mae saw the white, strained look on his face before he bowed his head over Nick’s again, saying something lost in the sounds of battle.

Alan stooped and picked up Nick’s fallen sword, and he was suddenly carving his way toward them, passing Mae without acknowledging her at all except by clearing a path for her to follow him.

Alan dropped to his knees by Nick’s side just as Jamie got to his feet. The sword fell carelessly out of his hands and he touched Nick’s hair, his fingers coming away crimson and slick with fresh blood.

“Nick,” said Alan, and his voice broke on the name. “Oh, God. What have I done?”

A man rushed at Nick and Alan, one of the magicians and not an illusion, Mae was almost sure, going for them at their weakest moment. Mae stepped in, stopping his rush cold, and shoved her knife in below his ribs as hard as she could.

She’d been right. He wasn’t an illusion, he was a man.

He was the second man she’d killed. Mae looked into his slack, surprised face, the weight suddenly sagging on her knife, and she wanted to cry or scream.

She shoved him and he toppled backward, a heap of bones and flesh, with the ugly gracelessness of death. She’d wanted this battle. That meant she had to take what came with it.

“Hey,” Nick said, his whisper a thread of sound in all the screaming noise of battle and yet somehow catching her ear all the same. “You were holding that sword like it was a big dagger. Never let me see you do anything like that again.”

Alan made a sound that was torn roughly between a sob and a laugh.

The world went still.

Mae turned away from the brothers on her right and her mother on her left to find the source of all that stillness, the storm calmed as if it had never been, all the illusions suddenly night air. Above the bloodstained square there was suddenly nothing but stars.

The Obsidian Circle had stopped, hands up and magic arrested in their palms. One of them was a jaguar, and even it had gone still.

The only thing moving in the square was Jamie.

“Drop the helpless act,” he said in a pleasant, reminiscing voice. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”

“Um,” said Seb.

The night was so clear, the air suddenly crisp as winter. Mae found herself caught by Jamie’s eyes.

They were not brown, not even brown with a scythe-bright gleam. They were filled with the silvery shimmer of magic, making his eyes a scintillating wash of light. He looked blind.

On the side of his jaw there was a black demon’s mark, shadows crawling and burning against his pale skin.

A magician with a demon’s mark, not a magician’s mark, and power flooding through it.

Mae heard her own voice in her head. Nick could use Jamie as a channel for his power. It would help him to have a—a pet magician.

“And you said, you could be so much more,” Jamie told Gerald.

Gerald didn’t look scared the way Seb had, for Jamie or for himself. He stepped forward.

“You can be so much more.”

Jamie blinked at him, reptile-slow.

“You’re like me,” Gerald went on, low and coaxing. “You’re a magician. You know whose side you’re really on.”

Jamie looked back at Mae with her bloody knife, Alan with his bloody hands in his fallen brother’s hair. Mae followed Jamie’s gaze and saw Nick stirring, obviously healed before her magician brother had gotten to his feet.

“Not yours,” Jamie said. He lifted a hand, and the Obsidian Circle magicians fell against the side of the town hall like dolls hurled against a playroom wall.

Nick scooped up his sword and Alan took out his knives again, and Mae and Annabel joined them on either side. They all moved to stand behind Jamie.

Mae sought for Sin and found her, long knives in her hands and her silk shirt torn. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, What are you waiting for?

“Join up,” Sin snapped, and the Goblin Market stood with the demon and the traitor and the magician as one.

Gerald got to his feet slowly, the other Obsidian Circle magicians rising slowly around him, their eyes wary. Seb stayed down, his wrists propped on his knees, watching Jamie.

“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” Jamie told them, his luminous, terrible eyes traveling across every face in the Circle, and back to Gerald’s. “I can’t kill you.”

“I could,” Nick volunteered.

The Goblin Market seemed to agree with Nick, drawing in closer, a tight, angry knot. Jamie glanced around at all of them and hesitated; he seemed to be on the verge of stepping back.

Then Gerald knelt on the ground.

“That’s right,” he called. “Come here.”

Climbing over bodies and slipping through warriors’ legs, his footie pajamas stained with blood and the foul ooze of dead things, came Sin’s little brother, Toby. He walked right into Gerald’s arms.

Gerald straightened, holding the child’s chubby hand out palm up and speaking a few words.

The world changed again, an illusion dissolving like mist in the sun, and they all saw the mark.

The mark was black and terrible in the hollow of that baby’s little hand: It looked like the magician’s sigil, but not quite enough like it. It showed a hand, forming a fist around someone else’s heart.

Gerald must have invented two different marks. A variation on the magician’s mark, which drained power from people instead of circles, and this one.

“This is the magician’s version of the demon’s mark,” Gerald said, his eyes on Sin. “I have complete control over anyone who wears it.”

He’d put the mark on Toby at the Goblin Market. He’d handed the baby over to Mae when he had no further use for him.

“I hold this child’s life in the palm of my hand,” Gerald said in a clear, carrying voice. “My Circle is walking out of here tonight.”

“Toby,” Sin said in a strangled voice, reaching for him. “How—”

“I wouldn’t,” Gerald advised. “I called the child here. I can make him go anywhere I want him to go. I could make him walk off a cliff. I could have him possessed. I could stop his breath with a thought. Have your people stand down.”

“Get back!” Sin commanded.

But the Market could taste blood. They finally had magicians at their mercy, and Sin was not the leader yet.

“The child’s as good as dead anyway,” said Matthias the piper, his bow still strung. “It’s not like he’s ever going to take it off.”

“Matthias!” Sin exclaimed, but there was a murmur of agreement around the square.

“And we don’t want a leader who can be blackmailed!”

Toby started to cry, his soft, wailing voice rising above the slanted roofs of the buildings around the market square. Jamie gave Mae a look she couldn’t read, not with his magic-hot eyes, but then his hand sought hers and she realized he was horror-struck.

“I take no pleasure in this,” Gerald told Jamie, but Jamie continued to look as sick as Mae felt.

The piper was right, though. Mae could see no way to make Toby safe.

Sin stood with her back straight and her knives still drawn, her mouth trembling.

“Kill them,” said Matthias, and the crowd surged.

Alan said, “Wait.”

He came forward, made it almost to Gerald and the baby in a few long strides, and then Toby gave a long cry of pain. Alan stopped, hand outstretched.

“What good is the child to you?” he asked, his voice wrapping sweetly around every word, less guiding than simply making you want to follow him. “You can hear them. They’ll kill you anyway. You need a better hostage than that.”

He slanted a dismissive look at Toby’s small head. Gerald was starting to look thoughtful.

“You need collateral to control the demon,” Alan said, and he turned his hand palm up, reaching out the other for the baby. “Hand over the baby. Transfer the mark. You can have me.”

“Alan,” Nick said in a terrible voice. “Alan, no.”

He started forward, knocking down everyone in his path.

“Now,” Alan commanded, and Gerald reached out and clasped his hand.

It was over that soon. The baby was held gently in Alan’s arms, and the mark was branded on his palm.

“Shhh,” Alan murmured to the child, who was quieting already in his arms. “You’re safe now.”

He took two steps toward Sin and put her brother in her arms. She accepted him almost numbly, her face blank but her arms going around Toby tight.

Alan did it just in time, an instant before Nick reached him and spun him around, one hand clenching tight on Alan’s shoulder. For a second Mae thought Nick was going to punch him.

Nick held on for a moment, in a tight grip that looked more like violence than anything else, and then he turned to Gerald.

“I’m going to make you sorry,” he whispered in that demon’s voice, like chains settling on your hands and feet, like a chill getting so deep into your blood it would never leave and you would never be warm again. “I’ll make time longer, just so you can suffer in it. I’ll never let you die. You’ll live to the end of the world, crawling, bleeding, begging, wishing you had never even thought of touching my brother.”

Gerald didn’t answer in words, but Alan gave a short scream between his teeth and sank to his knees, and Mae knew exactly how much pain he would’ve had to be in before he let Nick hear that.

When Alan rose, he almost staggered. For a moment that seemed normal, and then Mae remembered he was meant to be healed now.

“Your brother was whole for all of five minutes,” Gerald said. “Was it worth handing over any of your power for that?”

Nick shivered in one tight, controlled burst, as if someone had hit him.

“My ring,” Gerald commanded.

Nick yanked it off his hand and threw the silver circle to the ground at Gerald’s feet. He did not look away from Alan.

“Yeah,” said Gerald, stooping to pick it up and sliding the bloodstained ring onto his finger. “I think we’ll go now.”

“Who said you could go?” asked Matthias. “Now you don’t even have a child of the Market. Let the traitor die.”

“It’s worth a sacrifice,” said a woman Mae remembered from the chimes stall. Alan looked at her, his face startled, and she turned her eyes away. “It’s one life,” she said. “We were all willing to risk ours.”

The square seemed to turn upside down as Nick snarled, tipped into a darker world. Everyone shivered as the wind rose. Mae saw her breath on the air like a dragon’s.

“You dare,” Nick said softly.

The Market people cleared a space around the demon now, unity dissolving, tables turning, only a few of them left standing with Nick. Alan, Mae, Jamie, Annabel. And Sin, trembling, with the child in her arms.

“Wait,” Sin said, sounding uncertain. They paid her no attention.

“Wait, you idiots!” Mae shouted. “Let’s give the magicians a chance to surrender.” She let her eyes move significantly to Jamie. “We’ve seen how useful they can be.”

There was sudden murmuring among the Market people. Mae did not think they sounded largely in favor of the idea, but at least they were talking. Seb uncurled from the ground, green eyes alight.

“You must be joking,” Gerald scoffed, but Mae saw that a couple of the other magicians looked thoughtful.

“I for one think it’s an excellent idea, Gerald,” said Celeste Drake, moving from the shadow of the church with the Aventurine Circle behind her. “Why don’t you surrender to me?”

The Market people flowed back toward Nick and Jamie, toward them all. They were united again, trapped between two magicians’ Circles.

Celeste paid them no heed at all. She sailed forward, serene as a china swan on a glass lake, until she was standing before Gerald with her hands held out to his.

“I told you that you would reconsider my offer.”

Gerald regarded her coolly. “And you told me you’d take everything I had.”

“True,” Celeste admitted. “But in light of other contributions you can make …” Her eyes slid to Alan. “I’ll make you the same offer I made before. Will you take it? Last chance.”

“I will,” said Gerald, and put his hands in hers.

“Circle of my circle,” Celeste said. “You are mine, and your marks are mine, and your magicians are mine. I will brand you with the sigil of the Aventurine Circle, and no loyalty will come before your loyalty to me.”

“I’m yours,” Gerald told her, his head bowed.

“And your enemies are mine,” said Celeste, her icy gray eyes sweeping the Goblin Market army. “And you will be leader of the Circle when I die. The bargain is struck. Do any of you dare stand against the Aventurine Circle?”

Everyone stood silent. There were just too many magicians, Mae thought. There was Helen the magician with her swords bright in her hands, Gerald with his marks: the union Mae hadn’t wanted and hadn’t planned on. Even with Nick and Jamie both, there were far too many to fight. Celeste wasn’t likely to start fighting until she had the Obsidian Circle safely branded as hers.

The battle was lost. Their best chance for survival was to stay quiet.

Celeste turned away, and Gerald started after her. For a moment Mae thought it was over.

Then Gerald stopped beside Jamie and said, “Come with me.”

Jamie stared at him.

“You know you have to now, don’t you?” Gerald asked. “Now you’ve had power. All you want is more. Come with me.”

Jamie kept staring, mouth a tender, hurt shape, still a little in love despite everything.

“Okay,” he said.

“What?” Mae shouted.

She surged forward, but Annabel got there first, her sword a blur of light and then a line of steel held between Jamie and Gerald.

“You’re not taking him,” said Annabel. “He’s mine.”

There was a ring of steel on steel.

Helen of the Aventurine Circle had lunged forward, and now her blade was kissing Annabel’s. They stood looking at each other. Annabel lifted her chin, defiant, and Helen’s lip curled.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “He belongs to us now.”

Mae thought Helen would turn away then, and she did.

First she lunged in and drove her sword to the hilt in Annabel’s chest. Annabel made a small sound, more incredulous than pained, her body crumpling on the blade. Helen slid her sword free and swung back into line with the other magicians.

Annabel tumbled to the ground on her back.

“Mum,” Jamie said, his voice small and terrified, and he dived to his knees by her side. Mae didn’t know why there was a clawing in her chest, didn’t know why her mouth had gone dry, when Jamie was going to heal her. When Annabel was absolutely fine.

She did not look fine. Their mother was lying with her smooth blond hair fanned out on the bloodstained bricks. Blood was trickling from one side of her mouth, was a spreading pool on her white blouse, and her eyes were staring wide and sightless into the clear night sky.

Mae made a low, hurt sound in the back of her throat. Jamie’s hands, frantically patting and searching, had gone still.

“Mum,” Jamie repeated, panicked, as if he was searching for her, as if he had lost her and could not find her, as if she was not right there. “Mum, please, please. Mum.”

And without Mae making the decision to kneel down, there she was on the bricks, on her hands and knees beside her brother. She was making that low, wounded sound again, her hands on Annabel, shaking her and shaking her until Jamie pulled at her wrists.

“Mae,” he said, crying, close to her ear. “Mae, don’t. She’s—she’s—”

She was crying too. He was nothing but a blur of magic-hazed eyes and demon’s mark, and then he was holding on to her, clinging around her neck the same way he’d clung to their mother this afternoon.

“Hush,” Mae said, her voice sounding oddly distant in her own ears. Jamie’s tears were slipping down her neck. She had to be strong for him. She smoothed her palm down her brother’s shivering back, down the line of his spine. “Hush,” she whispered again. “I know she’s dead.”

The Goblin Market was camped out in Portholme Meadow, not so far away from the town. It was, Mae vaguely remembered, the largest meadow in England. It was also, she realized dimly, quite beautiful. The caravans and tents of the Goblin Market took up only a tiny bright space of all the lush greenness, and all around them in the early morning were the sounds of birds singing and trees whispering to one another.

Mae was lying alongside Jamie in a red tent, watching the shadowy patterns the leaves cast on the fabric. She was trying not to move, trying not to wake Jamie after he’d cried himself to sleep, but she couldn’t sit among all those strangers whispering condolences to her. She just lay there, watching the shadows move.

She didn’t even know what they had done with the body.

“You do realize you’re as good as dead,” Nick said from outside the tent. “With that mark on you. Gerald’s playing with you like a cat with a mouse. He just wants us to think about what happens next. You’re already crippled again.”

“I don’t mind that,” Alan said gently. “It was you who minded.”

Nick laughed with a razor edge to it. “Oh, you like being in constant pain.”

“The leg’s part of who I am by now. It just happened—”

“Because of me!”

“Yes,” Alan told him, and Nick was suddenly, terribly silent. “Being your brother is dangerous,” he continued. “It was a risk I took, it was something I chose. I changed myself and the world to keep you. And you were worth it.”

“And if Gerald kills you,” Nick ground out. “If he does worse.”

“Then you were still worth it.”

There was silence then, and no shifting of shadows. Alan didn’t even try to reach out to Nick.

“You are so stupid,” Nick grated out at last. “I hate you sometimes. I hate you. And I don’t know how to save you!”

“Shhh,” said Alan. “Don’t wake Mae and Jamie.”

Nick made a low, awful sound, like the snarl of a nightmare monster, and then his shadow retreated.

Mae climbed slowly to her feet and emerged from the tent flap into the hot sun.

“I’m already awake,” she said. “What did they do with the body?”

Alan, standing like a lone guard by their tent, said, “They’re taking her to Mezentius House.”

“Why?” Mae asked, prepared to be outraged at anything. “My mother—she wasn’t possessed.”

“There’s a graveyard there,” Alan told her very softly, as if he was terribly sorry for her. “In case you or Jamie ever want to visit it.”

“I never will,” said Mae. “Never.”

They couldn’t report Annabel’s death, though, couldn’t show the police the body of a woman murdered with a sword without all having to face inquiry. The only alternative was tipping Annabel into the river with the rest of the dead. Mae shut her eyes and made a strangled sound, trying to banish that thought, of these people throwing her mother in the river.

Alan spoke while she had her eyes shut, his voice soothing and terribly sad for her; exactly the right voice. “Okay.”

It made her mad. Her eyes snapped open.

“I don’t want to go out with you,” Mae hurled in his concerned face.

It felt as if there was a live animal scrabbling inside her throat, trying to draw blood. She was terrified she was going to cry.

She raged instead. “You played me. You asked me out to fool Gerald. You made sure that I wouldn’t say no before the night of the Market. You never intended to betray Nick for an instant. You just wanted me to tell Jamie you were going to do it, so Jamie would tell Gerald and Gerald would believe him because it was coming from the mouth of Alan’s girlfriend. It was a filthy thing to do.”

Alan turned his face away from her a little. There was a river stretching by the side of the camp, the waters tranquil and gleaming in the dawn light, hovered over by strange dragonflies.

“I know it was,” Alan said quietly.

“You couldn’t have trusted me?” Mae whispered.

“I could have. I didn’t,” Alan whispered back. “It was easier and safer to lie. I’m sorry.”

He’d probably been sorry the whole time he did it, but he’d still done it, heard what was wrong with Merris and worked out how to use that, got Mae to call up Liannan so he could strike a bargain with her and lie to her about what the bargain was, kissed her and lied, lied and lied and lied.

“You could have broken my heart,” said Mae. “And you wouldn’t have cared.”

Alan smiled a crooked, hurt little smile. “I couldn’t have broken your heart,” he told her. “You never liked me enough for that.”

Of all the girls I ever saw, I dreamed of you the most.

Mae swallowed and let her eyes slide shut for another moment. “I liked you a lot,” she told him. “I think—I think maybe you could’ve had a chance with me. But you lied.”

“Thanks for saying so,” Alan said, as if he meant it. And as if he didn’t believe her. He sounded sad, but resigned; he must have grown fairly used to the idea of losing her while he was lying to her.

Mae opened her eyes again and saw his narrow, pale face, his wonderful twilight eyes, and she reminded herself past the rage and pain that he had taken that mark last night. That at any moment he could be tortured, or possessed, or killed. His whole life hung on a magician’s whim, and he had done it for a child he hardly knew, for a child who belonged to the Market that hated him as a traitor and a girl who hated him because he was crippled.

He had lied to her, the girl he’d wanted to love, cold-bloodedly and relentlessly, for weeks. And then he’d done one of the noblest things she had ever seen.

She could feel the shaking inside her, starting low in her stomach and building, but she wanted to hide it from everyone else. “Alan,” she said. “You are crazy.”

“See, that’s why I started liking you,” he said gently. “Because you’re so smart.”

Mae would’ve attempted a smile, but her face felt like it might crack. Alan looked as if he was trying to think of ways to speak to her, to touch her, to make her feel better, and she thought they might work and wanted to run.

“Mae,” Jamie said tentatively, coming around the tent. “Can I talk to you alone?”

He looked flushed from sleep and tears, his spiky hair rumpled. He looked about twelve years old. Mae turned to him, as if he could pull her on puppet strings, desperate to do even the smallest thing for him.

“Of course, I’ll go,” Alan said. “I need to go find a place where Nick and I can talk things out properly. Somewhere on the other end of the meadow, away from people.”

Jamie smiled a wavering, falling-apart smile. “Or you could take a plane and have a conversation in the middle of the Sahara desert, possibly.”

“Might be safest,” said Alan. “Jamie, I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” Jamie said. “Alan, in case of—in case.”

He hesitated and then went up to Alan and put his arm around his neck, having to go on his tiptoes to hug him because Alan was so tall. Alan did not hesitate for a moment, just put his arms around Jamie and held on.

“Thanks for everything,” Jamie said at last, detaching and rubbing the back of his hand over his swollen eyes.

Alan looked at Jamie, puzzled and tender. “Everything’s been my pleasure.”

Then, being Alan and blessed with enormous tact, he looked at them both once more and just left, heading away from the Goblin Market camp and toward the hawthorn trees spreading broomstick-handle branches against the pale sky.

“Hey, you,” said Mae, the words sticking in her throat.

Jamie looked at her, his eyes back to being dark again, being the exact mirror of hers. He reached out and she reached out, fingers curling in together and linked tight, and she wanted to promise him that nothing would ever hurt him again, that she would protect him, that she would always be there, always.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “It’s all my fault. I thought if I went to London, I could help, no matter how strong Celeste’s Circle will be now. I thought I could send word back. I wanted to help. But instead I—I killed—”

“You didn’t,” Mae said fiercely. “It was me who made the plan. If it hadn’t been for me—”

“But you had to do it,” said Jamie. “And I—I still have to go to London.”

Mae felt her fingers clutch his, nails digging into the back of Jamie’s hands.

“I have to go, Mae,” Jamie insisted to her silence. “Alan’s wearing a mark; we have to know what Gerald’s planning to do to him. Celeste has got too many magicians, and control over Gerald’s marks. She’ll bring the war to us, and we’ll need somebody behind enemy lines. And—and we have to work out a way to bring the Circles down. Did you see some of the magicians? They wanted to surrender. They can’t keep thinking that the Circles are the only way, and killing people until they don’t even remember that it’s wrong. Someone has to do this. And I’m the only one who can. Will you be okay?”

He looked at her, hanging on to her just as hard as she was hanging on to him and biting his lips, scared and struggling and in pain and still trying to do the right thing. Her Jamie.

Mae tipped her forehead against his and held on for just a little while longer. “Yeah,” she promised him. “I’ll be okay.”

They stood like that until Jamie said, “Nick,” and Mae said, “Huh?” and then stepped back as Jamie said, “Nick. Over here. Nick!”

Nick was striding past the tent, clearly intent on finding Alan again, but at Jamie’s call he checked himself and came striding over to them. Someone had found him a new shirt, as the old one had been ripped in two and soaked in gore, but beneath the clean cotton his whole body looked tense and exhausted.

“What?” he asked.

Jamie let go of Mae’s hands with one last, clinging press. “I’m really sorry about this,” he said. “I know that you’re upset about Alan and you don’t know what to say to me about—about anything, and this is the worst time to try and talk to you. But I’m going to the Aventurine Circle so I can help Alan and all of us, because I’m the only one they’d let in. So there isn’t any other time I can talk to you. I just wanted to say that you were a great friend. I’m really glad you asked me. I’m really glad we did that. And you can go find Alan now. You don’t have to say anything at all.”

Jamie stood a careful distance away from Nick and spoke carefully too, anxiously, trying to get it just right.

He was seeing these moments as his last chance to get things right, Mae thought, sick and aching. In case he died somewhere in London, among enemies.

“What?” said Nick, and scowled. “What are you talking about? Don’t be an idiot. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I am,” Jamie told him sturdily.

“You want revenge for your mother?” Nick asked, and Jamie flinched. One of Nick’s hands closed in a fist and then loosened. He took a breath. “I’ll get it for you,” he said. “Tell me what you want, and I’ll make it happen. You don’t have to go anywhere and get your idiot self killed.”

“Okay, can you pass yourself off as a magician and gain Gerald’s trust and pass us information about Celeste’s plans and save all the magicians who want to be saved?” Jamie asked. “Because if so, awesome. I shall stay here and eat pie.”

Nick blinked at Jamie. “I was thinking more in terms of killing someone.”

Jamie’s smile this time was still wavering, but it almost looked real. “I know. But this is something I have to do. So I’m going to go do it. You take care of yourself, Nick.”

Jamie started to back away and his eyes left Nick, turning back to Mae.

“Hey,” Nick said abruptly, and tossed something at Jamie’s head.

Jamie caught it, fumbling it a bit, and then almost dropped it when he saw the rough carvings on the bright handle and worked out what it was.

“A knife, Nick?” he asked piteously. “I feel so betrayed.”

“It’s a magic knife,” Nick said. “I made it myself.”

“I don’t want to seem ungrateful when you have given me this thoughtful, homemade and totally terrifying gift,” Jamie told him. “But you can’t imagine that I’m going to use it.”

“Just to hold someone off. Just remember what I taught you,” said Nick. “Just buy a little time so I can come get you. Jamie. I’ll come get you.”

“Nick,” Jamie said. “I know. Thank you for my scary knife.”

He looked down at the knife, a bit helplessly, and then put it in his pocket. Then he started across the meadow in exactly the opposite direction to Alan, along the side of the river.

“Also,” Nick added curtly, “I’m sorry about your face.”

Jamie looked over his shoulder, and touched the demon’s mark crawling along his jaw with the back of his hand. “Sorry about saving all our lives by doing something you had to do?”

“Oh no,” Nick said blandly. “I just meant, you know. Generally.”

Jamie stared at him, shocked, and laughed. It was a real laugh, helpless and sweet, and Mae memorized it in case he died. Jamie by the river at dawn, laughing.

His eyes caught Mae’s and he stopped laughing. His gaze simply held hers.

You and me against the world. Mae nodded at him, and Jamie turned and walked slowly away down the river. He squared his thin shoulders as he went, and the gesture almost broke Mae’s self-control, but she had to be standing up and looking all right if he turned around.

“Don’t leave,” she ordered Nick between her teeth. If Jamie turned around, he would see that she wasn’t alone. She watched Jamie go until even when she squinted against the dazzle of the sunlight on the water he was nothing but a tiny black speck, and then the speck was lost. “Okay,” Mae said at last. It was all over. Jamie was gone. “Okay, you can go now.”

Nick nodded, his head dipping briefly. His hair was such a dense black it looked dusty in the sunlight, the light glancing off it and forming white around it. The shape the light formed was jagged and nothing like a crown.

“That woman,” he said. “Helen. I could have killed her on the bridge in London. I didn’t. I thought—it was meant to be a human sort of gesture, sparing your enemies. Showing mercy. I got it wrong. I wish I’d killed her. Then Annabel would be alive instead.”

Hearing her name was like a blow to a wounded place. Mae wanted to be blind suddenly, to be deaf and dumb and blind so they couldn’t tell her about it and she wouldn’t have to talk about it and she wouldn’t have ever seen it, her mother’s empty eyes staring up into the night sky.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said numbly.

“No,” said Nick. “But I’d like her to be alive. Not just for you, and Jamie. I’d—I liked her, I think.”

Annabel, always walking so perfectly in her high heels, her sword flashing in the midnight garden.

“Just go away,” Mae said, turning away from him, from his face, which was perfect and cold and uncomprehending, always.

“Mavis,” Nick said, and then stopped.

Annabel had thought that Mavis, that horrible nightmare of a name, was beautiful. She’d given Mae that name because she thought it was beautiful. Mae’s face felt too tight; her eyes were hot and swimming, and then they were running and her nose was running a bit too.

“Go away,” she repeated, almost gasping out the words.

There was only silence, so for a moment she thought he had gone. Then she heard him say, “No,” his voice deep and terribly close.

Nick put his arms around her. He moved slowly and awkwardly, but once he was done she was wrapped in strong arms, held against his chest. He was big and solid and warm all around her, and she found herself holding on to his shirt, holding tight in both clenched fists as if she was about to start beating on him. She was standing on her tiptoes, but he was taking most of her weight; she was pressing her face against his collarbone. It would be all right to hit him or to shriek or to do anything she liked.

This time yesterday morning Annabel had known nothing about magic. She’d had a day to learn, to show fear and grace, and then no more days.

Mae was just howling, screaming through her teeth, getting tears and snot all over Nick’s shirt. They were going to put her mother in the ground out by Mezentius House, and the alternative had been putting her in the river.

Nick’s arms were like iron bars around her. He wasn’t murmuring soothing words or stroking her back, nothing like the demon in her dream, nothing like a human would have done in his place, but he wasn’t letting go, either.

“Mavis. Mae,” he said at last. “I don’t know. You have to tell me. Is this right?”

“Yeah,” Mae said into his shirt, her voice breaking, and she cried without screaming, just leaning into him and smelling cotton and steel. It was awful and heartbreaking and she was exactly where she wanted to be, here, with him, in these arms and no one else’s, and she finally understood why she had kept coming back and why she’d kept acting like a crazy person, her plans always collapsing and nothing making sense. She got it now.

She was kind of in love with him.

It had never happened to her before, and he would not have even the slightest idea how to love her back.

She was too tired and broken apart to deal with that now. She just rested, her eyes shut and leaning against him, exhausted and almost glad. She loved him, and he was here.

It was tempting to try and fall asleep standing up, measuring his steady breaths against her own, but by then she figured she was calm enough, and she owed it to him to step away.

“Thank you,” she said. It came out sounding very formal. “I’m going to find Sin now. You can go after Alan.”

Nick nodded, looking down at her. She looked back up at those strange alien eyes, that cruel mouth, and her heart turned over in her chest as if he had flipped it like a coin to show a new surface.

“We’re going to sort this out,” she promised him. “We’re going to get Jamie back, and we’re going to make Alan safe. We are.”

Except there was no way to make Alan safe. Gerald could do whatever he wanted to him, anytime he liked, and Nick would have to watch.

Nick shifted, the line of his shoulders too tight, fury and helplessness on his face for one murderous moment, and then he nodded again.

“Tell me about your plan sooner next time. You’re the war leader, aren’t you?” he asked, and waited for her to nod. “So lead.”

Mae watched him turn and go in the direction his brother had gone, stalking him like a predator.

“Yeah,” she said softly to herself. “Sounds like a plan.”

Mae didn’t want to lie to Nick, so she went to find Sin, weaving through the narrow green pathways between the caravans and tents.

Sin was sitting in a deck chair with baby Toby in her lap, long brown legs hooked up over the side with her feet tucked into the place where the chair legs bisected. She was talking to Merris Cromwell.

Merris looked the same to Mae, except for her dead-black eyes. The measured, approving smile she gave Mae was entirely her own. Mae could not see a trace of Liannan in her by day.

“Mae,” Sin said with her vivid, welcoming smile, with passionate, determined sympathy. “Come sit with us. I was just telling Merris how amazing you were.”

“Indeed she was.”

Sin looked gorgeous and carefree this morning, her torn silk changed to a loose cotton top and a denim skirt that left her legs bare. Her brother and her leader had been saved. She’d got what she wanted.

Only she caught Mae’s hand as Mae went by, her fingers curling soft as a secret against Mae’s palm, and Mae liked her too much to hate her now.

Celeste’s war would crash down on Sin’s head too. They had to be united, the way they had been for a moment in that market square.

“I hear that you were the one who formulated the whole plan,” said Merris. “I hear that you were the one who tried to hold the force together by suggesting the magicians surrender. In fact, it seems you showed a great deal of initiative Cynthia here did not.”

Sin stopped smiling.

Mae frowned at Merris. “Sin did great. She got all those people together. I could never have done it without her.”

“Yes,” said Merris. “She showed all the hallmarks of a very fine lieutenant. But it occurs to me that what this Market needs is someone independent and intelligent.”

Sin’s dark eyes were suddenly blazing with fury and hurt. Mae just felt fury. She barely knew this woman, but she was in no mood to see one of her friends put down like this for no reason.

“I have only three years,” Merris said, her voice suddenly almost sweet, like the chiming of bells at the Goblin Market. “When I go, I want to be absolutely sure that my Market is in the best possible hands. From now on, I think I will be looking at you as well as Cynthia, trying to determine which of you should become leader of the Market in my place.” She paused. “That is, if you want the job.”

Mae looked around at all the colors of the Market, and thought of the nighttime square, the feeling of a plan when all the pieces fell smoothly together, how terrible it felt to be useless. Jamie had made a plan and had gone to carry it out.

She needed to do something, and she had loved the Goblin Market from the very first time she had seen it.

“Oh yes,” she said hoarsely. “I want it.”

Merris rose from her chair, more lightly than a woman of her years should have been able to. Mae found herself lost in those demon-dark eyes.

“Excellent. Time will tell,” Merris said, “which of you is up to the challenge. I look forward to finding out.”

Mae and Sin found themselves staring at each other, a coldness slipping between them for the first time since the easy start of their friendship. Mae was not surprised to find herself suddenly assessing Sin’s strengths and weaknesses, trying to think of ways to undermine one and exploit the other.

Sin’s eyes were narrowed, cool: surveying her new rival, the impostor.

And then Mae remembered how kind Sin had been to her, and Sin might have remembered that Mae’s plan had almost worked, or even what had happened to her mother. Sin looked away, through the twisting path of tent flaps and hanging lanterns, to the rolling expanse of the meadow. There were two dark figures against the horizon and the hawthorn. Nick and Alan, Mae thought, picturing Nick’s look of helpless fury, were having a fight.

She knew how it would go. Nick would rage and Alan would lie, and neither of them would ever leave.

“Well, look at it this way,” said Sin. “At least we’re not being stupid enough to fight over a guy.”

“That’s true.”

“Well. Let the best woman win.”

Sin shut her eyes, taking a moment to relax in the sunshine spilling warm over the meadow, light touching the tips of the grass blades with honey. Mae tried not to think about Alan’s heart in the hands of magicians or about Jamie friendless in their midst. She tried not to think about love or loss.

She looked around at the Goblin Market spread like a feast before her, and thought of war. She thought about winning.

“Yeah,” Mae said. “Sounds like a plan.”