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For a moment, nothing happens. Then the surface begins to shift, my finger sinking in, as if it’s melting without heat. As it softens, the half-liquid metal starts to move up my finger. I shiver, but force myself not to pull away as the gold crawls up to reach my knuckle, my palm. I can hear both of our ragged breaths as the strands of gold creep up and disappear beneath the bandage Wick recently wound around my hand. It feels like warm water, trickling upward.
Soon the sphere is entirely gone, and strands of liquid metal run up my skin like veins.
“Take off the bandage,” Caro says softly. Something in her voice makes me obey; I unwind the bloodstained cloth. It falls away to reveal the cut the time lender made, still fresh and angry red, and a tiny rivulet of gold—of blood-iron—of my time slipping into it, back beneath my skin where it belongs.
23
In the early hours of the night, Caro—still fever-hot, sweat sticking strands of her dark hair to her face—demands that I tell her how. Her voice is rough, her throat scratched from the shard of my time that stuck there. I tell her the truth over and over: that I don’t know, that I have no idea what made the time in my blood rebel against her and return to me. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. I put my seven remaining year-coins on Caro’s dresser, afraid to try feeding her again, and afraid to have them near me.
When I try to leave, to find blood-iron that behaves the way blood-iron is supposed to, Caro begs me to stay. After hours of this, she finally falls asleep in my arms, clinging to me with the ferocity of a child. Did my blood-iron make her worse? She’s pale, but her pulse beats steadily. Exhausted from the day, and knowing that Ina will return soon to help us, I let my eyes close.
When the dreams come this time, I welcome them.
In the darkness, I beckon to the girl with her face in shadow, already knowing that I must defeat her or die myself. She comes toward me with her hands raised. A terrifying world comes into focus around me: we face off on a dark plain, the grass around us is scorched black, with no other sign of life as far as I can see.
The girl approaches me, and flames spring up where her feet have fallen. A cloak snaps behind her, as black as ink, its hood hiding her face.
I am going to die, I think in the dream.
The girl stops two arm lengths away. She holds her hands out toward me, as if entreating me. Her wild, mocking laugh rises above the wind.
“My friend,” I hear her say, the sweet high voice seeming to emanate from all around me. “Don’t you trust me?”
The image dissolves, and I’m sitting on my bed, in our cottage in Crofton, looking down at my mother’s statue of the Sorceress. I’m cradling the carved stone in my palm. The relief is so strong it stings—but this time, I know I am dreaming. The stillness in the room frightens me more than the vision of the girl. All I can do is stare down at the statue, and stare, and stare.
Then, the statue moves.
It opens its mouth and laughs.
It brings its hand up, the one holding the knife.
I jolt awake in Caro’s bed, the collar of my dress soaked in sweat and tears. Familiarity stabs through me suddenly. The girl’s pose flashes in my mind—leaning slightly forward, her hands cupped in front of her. It aligns with what I saw in the vision at the hedge witch’s, of being held as an infant while the man carrying me stopped before a statue of the Sorceress, plucked a stone from her hands.
And then the same woman, but alive, not stone.
Then, in my mother’s statue, turned to stone again.
I shiver, bringing my arms around me for warmth. Is this what my father was trying to hide from me—that I have some connection to the Sorceress herself?
Beside me, Caro stirs. I realize that in my dreams, I’ve kicked our blankets off, exposing her upper torso. When I bring the fabric up to cover her, I realize her hands are cold. As I tuck them in, I notice for the first time how pale they are. . . .
My mind slows to a stop. She was caught near the vault only yesterday—and after my time in the mava cellar, it took days before my hands were completely clean.
I stare at her hands, and begin to shiver, a wave of confusion and fear threatening to drown me.
Gently, so as not to wake her, I roll back her sleeves—and stop. There is no mark from timeletting. No cut. No bandage.
She lied. Or someone did. Whatever happened to Caro is not what I’ve been told.
The lie is dark, opaque, unreadable, like a river so burdened with silt you can’t see the bottom. It courses through me, thick as my own time turned to liquid metal in my veins.
A line from Liam’s notebook, or my dreams, or my past, filters into my awareness, as though it has slept all along in my veins and finally made its way to my heart.
“Snake,” said Fox. “What have you done?”
There must be some mistake.
I ease off the mattress, careful not to shift it and wake Caro. I exit the room as quietly as I can, my breath tight in my throat.
Strengthened by the new-old time in my blood, I wind through the barely lit corridors. Just a few torches are lit, casting the empty halls in an eerie half-light, and the only sound is the snapping of the flames and my own uncertain footsteps.
My head begins to spin with thoughts, hard and blinding as gems in light.
Caro’s deception.
Papa’s secrets, his well-meaning lies.
The shock of the so-called hedge witch when her fraudulent spell worked on me.
The way that time has misbehaved around me all my life.
The dreams I keep having of the girl who would kill me, and all the other dreams of running from a shadowy figure, rising up now through the years, that Papa—and eventually, I—dismissed as the nightmares of an anxious child. Even the snatches of words and images from my favorite childhood stories, the ones about Fox and Snake—the ones Liam recorded in his little book . . .
All of these things are tied together in shifting and complicated ways, yet still nothing is clear. The revelation of how much Papa hid from me—how much he lied to me over my whole life—is like looking down, expecting to find stone beneath my feet, and seeing nothing but air.
I need to get inside the vault. I need to see what Caro lied about, and what Papa died for.
I turn a door handle, and another line shoots out of my memory, coating my whole body in gooseflesh.
“Fox,” said Snake, curling slowly around her friend’s heart. “It’s time we face the truth.”
24
In the dark, surrounded by mirrors and portraits of dead Gerlings, the distance from here to the vault seems to stretch out before me, the halls unspooling faster than I can walk, no matter how I quicken my pace. Tree branches scratch at the windows, and distant wind howls, as if winter itself is clawing at Everless’s stone walls, trying to find a crack by which it can reach in and drag me out.