15

15

I had never seen one before—there had never been any left to see—and it should have been impossible for there to be one now. Yet there was no doubt. The silver designs were exactly as I had seen them in Gluckstein's Introduction , only they weren't true silver at all. They gleamed starlight and mist, the light from another world.

It looked closed to my eyes. Surely it had to be—it was impossible for this door to be here at all, much less open. And yet a faint breeze teased my hair and nightdress, bringing with it the smell of salt and pine and rain. I took a step closer, against my better judgement, almost against my will.

Who are you?

The voice rustled through my head like the wind in the trees. I stiffened at once.

The door might not be open, but it wasn't wholly closed. There was something on the other side.

The voice came again. Who are you?

I knew better than to give my name. Still, it rose to the tip of my tongue. I had to bite down on it and swallow.

Another susurration, another breath of air. Come closer.

My feet took one step forward, then another, and this time there was no doubt they were doing so without any guidance from me. Something was reaching out, stirring the tangle of my nerves and bones, drawing them closer. I should have been frightened, should have been fighting, but the silver drowned out any feeling except wonder and a vague melancholic awe. It was impossible, and so beautiful.

The door was close enough to touch, close enough to see the faint lines of chalk beneath the silver, to make out the grain of the paper beneath even that. I wondered if I would die when I reached it. I wondered what that burning light would feel like beneath my fingers, and what lay beyond.

The crash of a door behind me. A voice, breathless and familiar. "Occultare."

There was no sound, no spark of light. The lines of the door simply retreated into the wall, spidering back into the corners as though they had never existed. The sudden dark hit me like a physical blow, and feeling rushed back with it. I fell back, gasping, shaking, my mind reeling from what I had seen, what I had nearly done.

Hands caught my shoulders deftly, comfortingly. "It's all right," the voice was saying. "It's safe now. You're safe."

I turned and saw with no surprise at all that I was looking at Alden Lennox-Fontaine.

"You know, all you had to do was ask," Alden said, after the silence had stretched out to the thinness of a scream. "I would have told you."

Even then, I knew that he believed it, and also that it wasn't true.

"It's a door." Saying it out loud made it even more impossible. And yet I had known what I would find, hadn't I? I must have. I wasn't a fool. "A faerie door."

"I've warded it." He let go of my shoulders, gently, and I pulled away. "As long as it's hidden, nobody knows it's here; even when it's revealed, as you just found, I don't think anything beyond it can do very much. It's safe."

"It's a faerie door, Alden! It isn't safe." I had felt that grip on my mind, that silver light flooding my body and drowning my will. I shook my head, trying to settle my thoughts. "How can it be here? The Board closed them all. They locked the faerie world away."

"They did. But you see, this door was still open when the Accord came into effect. It had been open for a long time by then—four years."

"Opened by whom?"

"Me," Alden said, as I'd known he would. "I opened it. I was twelve years old. Clover, can we please sit down and talk this over?"

"Why can't we talk this over standing?"

"Well, we could, but these are new slippers, so it would be less than comfortable for me."

I couldn't help it—I laughed. It was a burst of nerves, nothing more, and I regretted it when I saw a touch of relief in his eyes. It was only then that I realised how frightened he had been to find me there—how his breathing was still slowing, and his hands curled up into fists to keep them from trembling.

"I didn't mean for this to happen," he added. "Please believe me. I didn't mean any of this."

He sat down on the couch, raising his eyebrows in mute inquiry; after a moment, I sat beside him. I was still trembling myself, after all.

"I want an explanation," I said.

"And I want to give you one. I always intended to give you one. Not this soon, though, and definitely not at four in the morning after a very strange night, so please give me a second to get this right, will you?"

I waited, watching as he gathered his thoughts and organised them behind his eyes. I was close enough to see every inch of him, in aching detail. I tried to reassemble those features, the ones I could have drawn blind, into someone unfamiliar. I couldn't. I had always known there was a secret behind that face, one I couldn't reach. Knowing the shape of it at last should have altered him in my eyes, but it was too late. I knew him too well, and not well enough.

"I told you about my brother, Thomas, didn't I?" he said at last. "I told you that he meant to go to war, that my parents argued, that he said it was no use, he was leaving in the morning."

"Yes. And in the morning he was gone."

He didn't respond to that. "That was the longest night of my life. I lay in bed, as wide awake as I've ever been, and all I could see was Thomas getting on a train and vanishing from our lives. I don't know how it was, but I never had illusions about war. I never believed in glory. I knew it was violent, and filthy, and that Thomas would come back broken or not at all." He caught himself. "Well. I don't have to tell you."

I thought of the night before Matthew left, the way every rustle of the leaves outside had seemed the wail of a banshee heralding his death, the way I lay awake and listened because my dreams would be worse. I think we all did, even Matthew.

"It came to me, at three in the morning, as all the very worst ideas do. I didn't have the power to keep Thomas from war. But something did. All I needed was a book, and the magic to punch a hole in the world."

"A faerie door." I shook my head again, this time in disbelief. "It was idiotic."

"I was an idiot," he said bluntly. "I think I barely understood that faerie deals were dangerous, and I wouldn't have cared if I had. Crawley teaches all sorts of bad behaviour, but the worst thing it teaches is that we're exceptional, not bound by the rules that govern ordinary people. Either way, it was almost dawn when I crept up to this room—it was our playroom, back in the day, although you wouldn't know it now—and drew the chalk lines of that door." He looked at the wall, where the lines had recently glowed in silver. "I'm still not sure how I did it. You know my abilities as well as anyone alive by now—I'm talented, not exceptional. The only explanation I can find is that something else was pushing from the other side."

I felt sick.

"It didn't go wrong," he said, reading my face. "Not the way you think. The runes worked. The faerie came through and was trapped, exactly as it was supposed to be. It was perfectly polite—amused, I think, to be summoned by someone so young. I made my bargain for its freedom, and it accepted that bargain. I thought I'd done so well. It hadn't escaped, after all."

"They don't only want to escape, Alden. The fae make deals in the hope of causing mischief and pain. You must have known that."

"I thought I was being clever. I thought I was outwitting it." He laughed a little, that bitter self-deprecating laugh I was beginning to understand now. "All those stories of plucky young boys tricking the fae. Not that I blame the stories. It's right to tell children that monsters can be defeated. I was just far too slow to grow up and realise that most of the time they aren't. And so I pulled open a door to faerie country and wished for whoever was on the other side to keep my brother from the war."

"And it stole him away." It seemed obvious now. I should have seen it before. I might have, had the light of Alden's friendship not been so blinding. But I had believed him that afternoon when he had told me he didn't know what had happened to his brother; I had believed, too, that there were no faerie doors left in the world. Now I knew that neither of these things was true, the last ten months were beginning to make a new and terrible sense.

I tried to collect myself, to speak as normally as I could. "I'm sorry about your brother, truly. I just don't understand what you've been trying to achieve with our research. Even if we could safely deal with the faerie behind that door, your brother is lost. The fae never give back the people they take."

"Thomas isn't lost," Alden corrected me. "He's a hostage. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a reward."

"A reward for what?"

"For doing what it tells me." He paused, and again I saw that familiar sifting and organising, that decision of what to tell and how. "That's the one thing that went wrong with the spell, on a technical level. I couldn't close the door again. Not all the way. Somehow, the faerie managed to keep a crack open. It can't come out, don't worry, but it can whisper through it, as I'm sure you heard. Every night I'm here at Ashfield, it speaks to me—sometimes in my brother's voice, sometimes in its own. It tells me that Thomas is suffering, lost in faerie country, growing no older and forgetting who he is, and if I don't help him, he will stay there forever. But I can free him. All I have to do is open the door and let the faerie in."

My throat was dry. "Let it into what? The world?"

"Into me. It wants me. It's hungry for a physical form."

"And you've been trying to close the door all the way." I put all the warning I could into my eyes—as though, at this late stage, I could shame him into sense. "Of course you have. You wouldn't be so monumentally stupid as to think you could do anything else."

"If I close it, Thomas really will be trapped forever. The door will be subject to the Accord—it will never be opened again. I need to get him out. The trouble is, I also needed to make sure it would work this time, especially after what went wrong at Amiens. I need it to be safe when—"

"When you let the faerie behind that door out," I finished flatly. "When you make a bargain with it."

"It was what you wanted too, wasn't it? To make a bargain that would save your brother?"

"Not like this! I was going to write a proposal and present it to the Faculty for further study! We all were."

"And how seriously do you think the Faculty will take it? A proposal presented by four undergraduates, two of them female, one of them not even Family? Oh, they might look closely enough to see that the spellcraft is sound, they might put it in the library, they might award someone a grant to look into it ." The bitterness in his voice startled me. It was my own, reflected back—only in my case it had grown from years of being looked down on for my gender, my upbringing, my family; from seeing my brother used as a weapon in someone else's war and thrown aside broken when he was done; from a thousand dismissive glances and sniffs and shoulders turned aside. Alden had never had any of that. He was the golden child of our year. I couldn't work out on what soil his resentment could possibly have taken root. "Nothing will be done for years, if it's done at all. Even if they agree to lift the Accord, what would be left of your brother by then? What would be left of mine?"

That stopped me short. I remembered against my will the last midnight I had seen, the tendrils of bark devouring muscles and bone and skin, the green glint in Matthew's eyes.

"We can do it now," Alden said. "We know how to trap a faerie safely between worlds and force it to do our bidding. Next week is Lughnasa. That's a powerful date—the magic will be stronger then."

"The faerie is stronger than the imps. I doubt the two of us could trap it."

"Not the two of us, no. But there are four of us. Two to open and close the door and make the bargain, two to signal the right moment and to hold the gate closed."

"Is that why you asked us here?" Strangely, this of all things felt like a betrayal. Our friendship, this summer, the four of us at Ashfield… Those were sacred things. The thought that they had an ulterior motive was sickening, like a church being used for money laundering. "Asking Hero to help research faerie doors, then me, then Eddie… Have you been planning this all along?"

It must have sounded terrible to him too, because he winced. "Not like that. I mean—yes. I have. I've been planning it since I was twelve. I asked for Hero's help, because I needed it and I thought it could help her too, and I did the same thing to you and Eddie. I didn't mean to drag you all into it as far as I have. If the spell could be performed by a single mage, I would have taken our research and done it alone."

"You could have told us earlier."

"I meant to talk to you all about it as soon as we came up here. I just kept putting it off. I knew what you would say. And… at Camford, it doesn't talk to me. The faerie. I forget what it's like. The thought of actually opening that door at last, well…" He caught himself with a shrug, a little embarrassed, and I knew he thought I wouldn't understand. In fact I did, all too well. I remembered how my plan to stay in the room with Matthew over Christmas had broken down at that first glint of faerie light. "Never mind. I've always been a coward about things that matter. But I really do think we can do it."

"We can't." It sounded weak to my ears, and probably to Alden's as well. He had seven years of obsession behind him. I was pushing back with the reflexive thoughts of a few minutes. I drew a deep breath, trying for firmness once more. "I understand why you opened that gate, Alden. Truly. I would have done the same thing to save my brother."

"You wouldn't have. You let your brother go, as you should have, because he asked you to."

"But I didn't want to!" It came in a burst of frustration and guilt, like water pushing through a broken dam. "I don't even know if I should have—whether I did the brave thing and respected his wishes, or the cowardly thing because I was more afraid of losing his approval than I was of losing him. If I had known about magic back then—if I could have just made a wish, and he could have stayed safe…" I bit back the words pushing at my throat, knowing that they would bring tears with them. "You see, I do understand. I understand why you need to save him now. But—"

"No, you don't understand." Alden was quiet for a moment, lost in thought or memory. "We communicated well," he said at last. "The faerie and I. Too well. I was twelve, and my soul was open for inspection. It saw not just what I wanted to tell it, but what I wasn't saying. I told it I wanted Thomas to be kept from the war. It saw that I was jealous of him—for being older and better than me, for my parents' favour, and above all for Ashfield. In those days I loved this house with every piece of my heart, and perhaps some of those pieces didn't love my brother, or at least didn't think it was fair that he should have what he never seemed to want. And so when the magic kept Thomas out of the war, it listened to all of my heart. It took him away. That's what it taunts me with every night I'm here. That's why I have to put it right."

I didn't believe it. Still, I remembered what Hero had told me about Alden and Thomas, only hours ago.

"You didn't want your brother taken away," I said, and willed myself to be convinced. "Of course you didn't. You would have let him go to war if you did. You were trying to keep him safe."

"Was I? Or did part of me just hate the attention he was getting and want him to have to stay here if I did? I'm not a good person, Clover. You believe I am because I'm clever and charming, but neither of those things are virtues."

It couldn't be true. It couldn't. "You've always been kind to me," I said, with effort.

"That isn't a virtue either. I've never had cause or desire to be otherwise. I like you very much, and always have. And you've never tried to cross me in anything I want to do. On the contrary, you've helped me every step of the way." My face must have shown something, because his softened. At once, he looked more like the Alden I had known for almost a year, and not the cold, strange young man who was talking about wishing his own brother dead. "Please don't look at me like that. Believe me, it would be so easy for me to say you're absolutely right, the faerie tricked me, I wasn't specific enough in my wishes and it deliberately twisted them to what I didn't want. I'm trying to be honest with you. But I'm not a monster. I want to undo the mistake my worst impulses may have caused."

"You can't," I said bluntly. "Whatever you did, whatever reason you had for doing it, it's done now. The best thing we can do is to close that door. Once it closes properly, you're right, it should fall under the umbrella of the Accord and lock for good. No more harm will come of it. We could do it ourselves, if you don't want to report it. We know how now."

"We know how to do more than that, Clover. We know how to safely bind a faerie and force them to obey us. Hero and Eddie will help if you agree, I know they will."

My voice was coming out strangled, as though there was a hand to my throat. "Why would I agree?"

"Because you can bargain with it to release your brother from his curse. That's what you want, isn't it? We can save both your brother and mine."

"There are safer ways to help Matthew. There have to be."

"Perhaps. But we haven't found them, and he can't wait forever. Besides, you want to do it this way. I know you do."

"Really?" I found a laugh that sounded more like someone being murdered in a West End play. "Because I'm insane?"

"No. Because you're clever and you're ambitious, and you love this." His answer came promptly. He really had been thinking about this a long time. He had been thinking about me for a long time, perhaps more deeply than anyone had before. "You haven't been helping me all these months because you like me, or because I tricked you. You haven't even been doing it for your brother, not entirely. It's your research too. I've seen you working on it, and every time we discover something new, your mind and heart and soul catch fire. You're a scholar to the core. Imagine what it would mean for magical scholarship if we succeed in this. Imagine what it would mean for you."

It would be revolutionary. The kind of magic that could change the world. The kind that would give Matthew his life back. The kind that would let me stay at Camford for the rest of my life. At that moment, I couldn't tell which of those things weighed more.

"I can't force you to help," Alden said into the silence. "I can't even persuade you—I know you too well for that. But you want to open that door too. If we closed it without trying, you'd never forgive yourself."

"Perhaps I'll never forgive myself for opening it."

I realised, as I said it, that it was an admission. Not I would never , but I'll never . I was already speaking as though opening that door was inevitable, as though I had made exactly the decision I was pretending I would never make.

If Alden noticed, he didn't show it. There was no flash of triumph behind his eyes. His face was soft, serious, imploring.

"Not as much as you'd regret never opening it at all," he said.

It was what I had told myself when Matthew had asked me to help him go to war, and I had imagined him staying behind, eaten up with bitterness. If we didn't do it, the rest of our lives would be haunted by what could have been.

I understand now, as I didn't then, what Alden meant when he said how easy it would be to pretend. Because writing this, it would be so easy for me to do the same. I could tell you that it was all Alden's fault—that I was nothing but foolish, that he persuaded me, tricked me, manipulated me. I could even say, as he could have done, that I only wanted to help my brother. It wouldn't be true. I knew what I was doing. I knew what we saw to gain, and I knew what could be at stake if we lost. I was eighteen years old, a scholar of magic, and I was as clear-headed in that moment as I have ever been before or since. I chose, and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.

"All right," I said. "We'll do it."

I think even Alden was surprised. "You're certain?"

"No. No, not at all." Excitement was bubbling in my chest where disbelief had been only minutes before, and it was impossible to stop a faint smile creeping to my face. Alden obviously saw it—his own lips curved in response. "We need to take every precaution. Even if we plan to trap it between worlds, we still need the binding circle just in case. And we'll need Hero and Eddie to help. It's too much for just the two of us. If they don't agree…"

"Yes, yes, of course." He wasn't really listening to me, or to himself. "We can do it, Clover."

"I hope we can." In that moment, though, I believed we could. I saw Alden's brother returned, Matthew restored, faerie magic revolutionised, our work revered. I saw myself a Camford scholar, now and forever, part of the world I loved. I was still being cautious, or I thought I was. But the dream of success had slipped under my caution like a blade under armour and stabbed me in the heart. The magic was sound, after all. I knew somebody could do it—I was willing to publish to that effect. Why not us?

"We can," Alden said. His eyes were alight now, and in their light I could see everything in him that I hadn't been able to draw. He was incandescent.

I didn't think. I kissed him.

Another lie it would have been easy to tell: that he seduced me, that it was part of a plan, that it was why I agreed to what I did. I know some said it later. It wasn't like that. I had already agreed, and so had he; our plans were made, they were glittering like stardust in the gap between us, and I reached out and closed the gap. He hadn't been planning that kiss, or even expecting it—I felt his breath of surprise, a pause that might have even been hesitation. Then he fell into it, willing and urgent and tender, meeting me exactly as I wanted to be met, giving me back what I gave. His hand went to my waist as it had at the Illusion, firm and gentle; mine went to the back of his neck, fingers burying in his hair, and then there was no gap between us at all.

We made so many mistakes that summer, the four of us, and so many more after. So many dangerous choices, because we were young and clever and invincible, and I regret almost every one. But not that one. Never that.