22

22

T he last time I had seen Eddie had been through a crack in the door at Chancery Hall, a few months after we had opened the Ashfield door. It was the same day I saw the news of Hero's wedding in the paper—a grey, miserable day, the overgrown trees and stone of Camford damp and dripping. I hadn't seen Eddie in lectures for weeks, not even in Botany. I'd heard that he was ill, and the few times I had knocked on his door before, he hadn't answered; I was ill and exhausted myself most of that autumn, and I reasoned that if he didn't want to see me, nothing would come of making him. But on that day I missed all three of them more than reason, and Eddie was the one whose loss I least understood. I knocked, and I kept knocking, ignoring the wear on my knuckles and the dirty looks I was getting from people passing.

"Eddie?" I called. "Please. I just want a word."

The door, at last, had creaked open. The gloom behind it startled me. I had never, in all the time I had known him, seen the curtains closed in Eddie's room. There were too many plants in there that needed the light.

"What is it?" Eddie's voice had come, husky and wary. He did sound ill, which I supposed was unsurprising. Eddie could weather a blizzard unscathed, but what we'd been through had been a storm of a different kind.

"It's me." Suddenly, after all that knocking, I hadn't known what to say. "Did you see about Hero in the papers?"

He sighed. "I really don't want to talk, Clover. Please."

There wasn't a lot I could say to that. "I just wanted to see that you were all right," I said weakly.

"I'm fine. Well, no, I'm not. I'm probably going home next week. Thank you for asking, though."

The door had closed, and next week Eddie had gone. It was one of many things that year that shouldn't have happened. I had known Alden was still angry at me for closing the door on his brother; I knew, or thought I did, that Hero blamed both of us for what had gone wrong. Eddie had forgiven me. I never expected to lose him too. But there had been nothing to be done.

Now, when the back door to the cottage opened, I was struck by the double blow of the similarities and differences. The door opened wider this time, enough that I could see the person behind it, and a flickering firelight glowed from within. Eddie was dressed roughly, old work trousers and a dark brown jumper with a hole starting in one sleeve. His dark hair and beard had grown out unfashionably; his face beneath it had rounded and softened. It would have suited him tremendously, had his expression not been tight with worry.

"Clover." The greeting wasn't unfriendly, but his grey-blue eyes darted to my face and glanced off without meeting my eyes, as they had the first time we had met. They did that to people he didn't know well, I had learned long ago. The first time his gaze had settled on me had felt significant, as though he were giving me his trust to hold. Plainly, I had dropped it.

"Hello, Eddie," I said, too bright and chipper. "It's been a while."

It's been a while. For God's sake.

"Come in, quick." He shepherded me in, gently, and I felt absurdly relieved at the touch of his hand on my arm. At least I wasn't entirely a stranger. "Are you all right? I saw the papers…"

"I'm fine, really. Just tired." It was an understatement. My arm throbbed, every muscle ached, and I had to swallow a yawn as I shrugged off my wet coat. "I'm sorry to bring trouble to your door."

"No, no," he said, but distractedly. He and Richard exchanged a look I couldn't read. "Go through, get warm by the fire. Can I get you anything? I'll check the kitchen."

"I'll keep an eye on the road," Richard said to Eddie quietly, then nodded to me. He, at least, gave me a smile that was real. "Lovely to finally meet you, Dr. Hill."

I didn't correct my title this time. "And you," I said, with a smile of my own.

My idea of decorating is to rearrange all the books on my shelves and nod in satisfaction, often, but even I could see that the sitting room into which Eddie led me was exactly right. It was a country sort of room, wallpapered in Victorian pale floral print, with low dark beams and heavy dark wood furniture and yellowing books stacked haphazardly on shelves. The pictures on the walls were eclectic, a mixture of botanical sketches and landscapes and scientific drawings of birds. And, of course, it teemed with plants in every convenient nook and crevice—ferns, ivy, rose trees, aspidistra, philodendrons, basil, all in earthenware pots. I sat down on an armchair between the fire and an overenthusiastic maidenhair fern, grateful beyond measure for the softness against my aching back, and fought the urge to close my eyes. I was a scholar now—this was more physical activity than I'd had in an entire year. I was starting to worry I would drift off before I had the chance to talk. Scruff trotted to the rug by the fire and settled there with a sigh that belonged to a much larger dog.

When Eddie came back from the kitchen, he brought with him half a seed cake on a plate in one hand and a pot of tea in the other. He poured and passed me a cup himself, sloshing a bit into the saucer. His hand was shaking.

"Sorry." He sat in the chair opposite, carefully. "There's no housekeeper here, I make do on my own. Well, not quite on my own, you saw…"

"Richard," I finished, and knew I was right when Eddie flushed pink.

"Yes." Some of the old warmth crept back into his voice. "You don't… You aren't annoyed I didn't tell you about him, back at Camford? There really wasn't anything between him and me, during those years, but I still felt odd never mentioning him. I know most people thought I fancied you…"

"I knew you didn't," I assured him. "I sort of thought there was someone else, too. I just couldn't guess why you wouldn't tell us. I understand now, especially if he wasn't Family. He isn't, is he?"

Eddie shook his head. "He was the gardener's son at my family's house. The one I tried to teach magic when we were both young, do you remember?"

"The one who thought you were playing a trick on him?"

"He didn't think that for long." His eyes lightened, not a smile but the memory of a smile. "We practised magic together a fair bit, in those days. I meant what I said, he couldn't get a hold of spellcraft the way you have, but he got quite good at it after a while. My family would have thrown him out if they'd suspected any of it—the fact I was teaching him magic, the fact we were friends, the fact we might be something more. And as I said, there wasn't anything to suspect, for a time. We fell out just before I went away to Camford—my fault. I pushed him away to protect him, when he didn't ask for my protection. We didn't really speak again until—well, until after I dropped out. He was one of the groundsmen by then."

"The groundsman." I couldn't hold back a grin. "That's very Lady Chatterley of you."

Eddie's mouth quirked in response for the first time. "I thought that book was banned."

"Not in Paris. There's a copy being passed around Camford. I read it last month. I don't like forbidden knowledge."

"How was it?"

"A bit metaphysical for me. Hero would have loved it." The mention of Hero faded the smile from my face. I set my teacup down carefully, though it was barely touched. "You know why I'm here, don't you? You saw it in the papers?"

"I did." He sat forward, serious. At least he was looking at me now, although he wouldn't quite let our eyes meet. "About Hero first. I nearly contacted you then, but it's difficult to get a private message into Camford, and it had been so long since we'd spoken… Then the next day I saw the news about you."

"It wasn't Hero, Eddie." I decided to come out with it as quickly and bluntly as I could. "Sam Wells told Matthew that Lord Beresford was killed by a faerie curse. The same one that struck Matthew. The faerie from Ashfield."

I waited for disbelief, or at least for surprise. What I saw was the faintest possible hesitation, like a flinch. "Oh," he said.

I should have known. Eddie always did see things nobody else did. "You knew."

"Not about the curse, no. I definitely would have been in touch if I'd heard that. But I knew about Hero—at least, I suspected. You see, I saw it."

"Saw it? Saw what?"

"That night at Ashfield." I saw him draw breath, release it, the way my brother did when steeling himself to speak about Amiens. "You were standing in the circle alone, and the door was opening. I tried to reach you—the wind from faerie country was too strong. Hero was closer. She pushed you out of the circle, right as the door shut."

I had suspected it, really. I had wondered for years what that faint memory meant—the hands on my shoulder, the fall from the circle, the cry. Perhaps I had always known, as I had said to Alden, and hadn't wanted to know. Yet hearing it spoken aloud as a certainty, no room for comfortable doubt, was an agony like tearing back a curtain and being scorched by the light.

"Eight years ago." The words tasted like ash. "Eddie… You're saying that she's been under faerie control for eight years ?"

"Yes." Now, of all times, he sounded surprised. "When did you think it had happened?"

"That can't be. The fae don't keep up pretenses that long. Someone would have noticed Hero wasn't herself."

But this was no ordinary faerie. Nothing it did was ordinary faerie behaviour. It had plans. If those plans entailed breaking all three locks, it would have needed to find them all before it acted. That could well have taken eight years, even with a husband in Berlin.

Hero had been coming to Ashfield her entire life. All the years the door had been here, the faerie had been able to watch her—more than enough time for it to learn to impersonate her, at least for long enough to get her away from everyone who knew her well. Camford, of course, would have seen the enchantment on her and kept her from its gates, which is why it had known better than to let her go back to school. It had accepted a marriage proposal, moved her far away from her family; it had cut ties with us, the people who knew her best. And we had let it happen. We had left her, when she was trapped in her own head begging us to come back.

I had known Hero. I knew that beneath her cynical airs and toughness, she would have walked through fire or into any faerie ring for the people she loved, and she loved the three of us. I had punched a hole to another world to save my brother; I had no doubt that Hero, seeing us in danger and with no time for thought, would run into a faerie circle for us. For me . I had been the one still in the faerie circle. She had done it for me.

Eight years.

"If you saw this," I made myself say to Eddie, "then why didn't you say anything?"

"I didn't think anything of it at first. The door seemed to have closed, with the faerie on the other side. It wasn't until Hero didn't come back to school and her engagement was announced that I wondered. I worried it wasn't like her—and I suppose, then, I worried that it really wasn't her at all. I wondered if we really had closed the door fast enough."

"You never said anything to me."

"No." His hesitation was palpable this time. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, as though fighting the urge to stand. "I went to Alden. I told him I was concerned, and we should tell someone what we'd done. He—well. Let's just say he wasn't very happy with that idea."

I swallowed. "Did he threaten you?"

"No," he said, but unconvincingly, with too many syllables. "Not in so many words. He said I was wrong, and telling anyone now would ruin everything. He said the evidence of the door was gone now, and if I tried to tell anyone, they'd find no trace and he'd deny it ever happened. He said they'd believe him over me, which they would, of course. I was expelled from Crawley for violence and instability; Alden was the golden boy of our year. And… he knew about Richard, or suspected. They'd met a few times, when we were all children. I don't think Alden would have said anything, he's not like that, but…"

"God." I shouldn't feel sick, I reminded myself. I knew what Alden had just done to me when I had threatened to tell the Board about Ashfield. I knew he had convinced me to keep the imp windows from Hero and Eddie long ago, and because I had agreed I had never found out what he might have done had I not. "But I would have backed your story. You must have told him that."

"Oh yes." Even Eddie couldn't hide a touch of irony there. "He said I should be very careful about that. Your position at Camford was precarious enough—did I really want to drag you into scandal? They'd believe you even less than me."

Now I really did feel sick. "Is that why you dropped out of Camford?"

He shrugged. "It just started to get too difficult, the way it did at Crawley, only without the fighting or the tomato plants this time. I didn't know how to talk to you without talking about Hero, so I stopped talking to you, and so I never really talked to anyone. And I couldn't even look at Alden, after that. I would sit in lectures with my chest going tight and my head spinning too much to see my notes, and soon our classes stopped making sense. I stopped going to lectures, even the ones Alden wasn't in, and then it became easier not to leave my room. That was when they sent me home on medical grounds. My parents were furious, but I didn't care. I didn't care much about anything for a long time."

I should have seen it. I knew Eddie as well as I knew my own siblings. I had watched him change, and been bewildered and hurt by the changes, and yet somehow I never asked. It had made depressing sense at the time: My friendship with Hero and Alden had dissolved after Ashfield, so of course Eddie would go the same way. Besides, I had problems of my own. When he had gone home unwell, I had been relieved—because he was getting cared for, of course, but could I swear there hadn't been an element of selfishness to it as well? Had any part of me just found it too difficult to have him around?

"To be fair to Alden," he added, as an afterthought, "I think he truly didn't believe Hero was under an enchantment back then. Or he didn't want to, which is always the same thing with him."

"I'm sorry," I said weakly. "I didn't know."

He shrugged again. His gaze was firmly on the floor. "It wasn't your fault. Just one of those things."

I wasn't happy with that, but I didn't have time to probe further. I couldn't even think of any of this mess too carefully, or I would fall apart and take everything with it.

"Well, I know now," I said instead. "About Hero, and about you. And I need to put it right. I say I ; I really mean we . I'm asking for your help. We need to find her."

His face stilled, as it always had when presented with a new plan. I'd forgotten that: the way part of him retired to turn a proposal over while the rest of him gathered more information. Unexpectedly, my heart ached. "Do you know where she'll be?"

"If the Board are right, then she'll be headed for the Paris lock. Lady Winter seemed to think you might have relatives in France who can tell us where that is."

He neither confirmed nor denied it. "And then? There's no way to cast out a faerie once it's taken possession of a body."

I'd had a long broom ride to think about this. "But the faerie can choose to leave. There's clearly something it wants, something it's been planning for a very long time. Perhaps it might be willing to accept a deal: our help for Hero's freedom."

"We don't even know what it wants, much less what helping it would mean. There are a lot of things that could go wrong."

"I'll work out how to deal with each of them on the way. I understand if you can't come with me—I'd never ask you to. If you could just contact your cousin, tell me anything you can about the dryad… Please. I need your help."

He muttered something, too quiet to hear.

"I'm sorry?"

Eddie looked up at me then, and anger flashed across his face. I had seen that flash only once before, that terrible morning after the door had opened. "That's what you said to me at Ashfield." The words tumbled out and over one another, fast and unstoppable, like opening a door to a flooded room and being swamped by icy water. Or, perhaps, a door to another world. "It's what you always did to me, the three of you. You know, don't you? You all asked me to help you find a safe way to summon a faerie, and I agreed. You asked me to open a faerie door with you, and I agreed. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway, because your friendship and Alden's and Hero's was the most important thing I had and I didn't want to lose it. I'm not blaming you," he added, as I opened my mouth to—what? Protest? Explain? "It was my choice. I wanted to help. But that night broke me apart. When I got home from Camford, I didn't leave my room for three years. I was in pieces. It's only been this last year or so, coming out here with Richard, that I've started to feel some of those pieces come back to me. And the only time I've heard from you, in all those years, is you showing up out of the blue and asking for my help again. It isn't fair."

I sat there in silence, bitter guilt flooding my chest. He was right. I had always known that Alden tended to use Eddie to vent his frustrations, because Eddie would take it and never hit back. I had never realised, or at least never admitted to myself, that I had used him too, in far worse ways. I had used his intelligence, his loyalty, his desire to help. I had told myself I was bringing him into our project, when I should have been protecting him from it. I had even, in some dark unacknowledged corner of my brain, used the fact that he was there because I had asked him to be and not because Alden and Hero had. The four musketeers, Alden had called us once, but that meant someone had to be D'Artagnan, the outsider, and as long as Eddie was around, I no longer felt that was me.

"I'm sorry." The words fell flat—thrown into the air like a failed spell, drifting uselessly to the ground. "You're right. I was selfish and stupid, and I should never have got you involved in this. But we're all involved now, Eddie. We need to put it right."

"I know." He sat back with a long, shuddering sigh. The anger had faded now. He looked a lot more like himself than he had since I had come to the house—only very scared, and very, very tired. "And I do want to help. I really do. Or at least… I want to want to. I just don't think I can, not anymore. I've been out of the world for a long time now."

"You can. You've always been the strongest of all four of us, when it's come to it." I meant it. At the same time, though, I was worried. The Eddie I'd known had always been gentle, vulnerable, but with a core of steel. That core seemed bent now, fragile, as though it had really been made of some far softer metal. Gold, perhaps—the best substance for a heart, according to tradition, but perhaps the most malleable as well.

"I'm not," Eddie said, and now it was his turn to sound guilty. "Clover, there's something I have to—"

He never got any further. A quick knock at the door, and Richard stuck his head in.

"Sorry to interrupt," he said. "There are five cars coming up the road."

They were some distance away yet, I saw when we went to join Richard. He had been at the upstairs window, in a little alcove that overlooked the hills. In the distance, a few miles below, I saw the edge of the loch, with the main road following its edge before climbing toward the house. The cars rumbled along that road, going slow on the uneven ground but certainly heading our way. Their lights glittered yellow on the darkening waters.

"I don't understand," I said. "How did they know I was here?"

Richard started to answer. Eddie got there first. "It was me."

I turned to look at him, shocked. He stood in the doorway; he seemed to have shrunk, so that his jumper was too large for his frame, his eyes too large and dark for his face.

"I'm sorry, Clover," he said. "That's what I was about to tell you. Alden arrived up here yesterday morning. I think he'd been driving all night—he looked shattered. He told me that if the Guards didn't catch you, then you would likely show up here. He gave me a coin, a doublet charm, and told me to make it burn hot if you arrived."

We'd used doublet charms often, in the old days. It needed two similar artifacts—coins worked well—that could be linked by a spell. From then on, if one grew hot or cold, the other would change temperature to match. It was an easy signal. It would have taken a second in the kitchen for Eddie to perform.

"He said he wanted to talk to you in private, without the Guards involved," Eddie added, when I didn't speak. "He said he wanted to help you."

I found my voice. "Did you really believe him?"

With anyone else, I would have assumed so, and I would have understood. Alden was very plausible when he wanted to be. I had believed him myself, far more often than I should; he knew how to give people what they wanted to believe and help them fool themselves. But Alden had shown Eddie who he really was a long time ago. I doubted he had been fooled now.

" I didn't," Richard broke in. He was staring at Eddie too, somewhere between disbelieving and exasperated and concerned. "Bloody hell, Eddie."

"I understand," I said, as calmly as I could. "You were angry with me. You had every right to be. You didn't owe me anything."

"You don't understand." Eddie's head snapped up, frustrated. "Neither of you do. Of course it wasn't because I was angry with you—do you really think I'd betray you because of a stupid thing like that? I didn't believe him either, not exactly. It's just… I've always done what Alden says. Right from when we were at school together—before. At first it was because I loved him and wanted his friendship, then it was because I was afraid of him and scared not to have it, and now I don't know where those two things start and end. But I swear, Clover, he told me that he only wanted to talk to you without the Guards about. I hoped he meant it. I tried to tell myself he did."

I understood exactly what Eddie meant. Right until that point, I too had held a faint hope I might have been wrong, that Alden had told the minister exactly what he'd promised and everything afterwards had been out of his control. I hadn't even realised it, until it flickered and died in my chest, and the world got a little more grey.

"How long until they get here?" I asked.

I was asking Eddie, but Richard answered. "About five minutes. We'll lose sight of them around the hills for a bit, then we'll see them on the driveway."

Thank God for the highland geography. "Then we need to get moving. I'm sorry, Eddie, but we both need to get out of here now. The broomstick can take the two of us—in five minutes we can be long gone."

I said it firmly, though every nerve in my body quailed at the thought of getting back on the broom and taking off into the night. So much for falling asleep in the chair where I sat. I wasn't even sure if my legs could bend again so soon.

"I can't." Eddie shook his head, as if I'd argued otherwise. "I mean it, Clover. I said downstairs I didn't think I could, and now, like this…"

Richard spoke before I could. "Eddie," he said. "For God's sake, get out of here. I could understand being afraid of the fae, but you're not. You're not even afraid of the world, whatever you say. You were exactly right: You're afraid of Alden Lennox-Fontaine. You always have been, even when you were friends, and you need to stop it. He can't do anything to you worse than he makes you do to yourself. If you won't listen to me, will you please listen to Clover and go do what you've known you have to do for the last eight years?"

I don't know what convinced him, in the end. I knew so little of their long, secret history together. But I saw the moment it worked. Something flickered behind Eddie's eyes, and then caught. He nodded, without a word, and I breathed again.

"Thank you," I said, to both of them. I pushed my glasses up my nose, trying to think. "Richard. Um…"

He made it easy for me. "What do you need from me? I could buy you time, if you like. I'm the groundskeeper, they won't question my being here alone. I'll say Eddie's gone back to his family, or on holiday, or anything you want them to hear."

"No," Eddie said, before I could. "If Alden sent those Guards, there's every chance he told them to bring you in as well. You need to run. Get across country—you'll be safer under trees. Don't stop, and don't come back." He paused, struck by a thought. "Take Scruff, and the hedgehog, it's still not well. The cats can look after themselves for a while, and anyway they're out prowling at this time of night. You'd never find them."

He nodded seriously. "Where shall I meet you, when it's all over?"

Eddie looked at me, questioning.

I thought it was unlikely we'd be meeting anywhere, ever again. I didn't say it. "Do you know Lady Winter's house at Pendle Hill?"

"No, but I reckon I can find it," Richard said. "I've got family not far from there."

"She'll hide you, I'm sure of it. And you can tell her I made it here safely, and we're off to France."

"Stick to the woods yourself," Richard advised. "It'll give you the best cover, all the way down to the coast."

I nodded, ignoring the screams of my lower back. "I'll go get the broom," I said to Eddie, before he could change his mind. "I'll be waiting out back. Bring something warm, and food if you can."

We barely made it.

I was waiting outside when I saw the first glow of car headlights cast the house into shadow. Eddie came out a second later, his worn old clothes covered by a much smarter grey coat, a leather bag over his shoulder, harried and frightened and determined in one glance.

"They're at the bottom of the driveway," he said, as he swung himself up on the broomstick behind me. "Go, go."

I kicked off at once. The broom wobbled precariously; Eddie grabbed my waist but made no protest. And then we were up, in the midst of the trees, skimming their topmost branches. Behind us, gravel crunched under tyres, and the woods flickered with the light from twin headlamps.

The trees had barely enclosed us when a shriek split the sky: the high, whistling scream of a defensive spell. I had heard it only days ago, propelled toward my car; I ducked on instinct now, and the broom hit the undergrowth. We both hit the ground, spluttering at the taste of dirt and leaves. I started to rise, half-ready to apologise. Eddie caught my wrist.

He didn't say a word. He didn't have to. The heat had reached us now, and the fiery light danced through the woods. Eddie's cottage was on fire. Hungry tongues of flame, red and yellow tinged with green, had already licked their way halfway up the blackened building; as we watched, wide-eyed, a hunk of the roof fell to the earth and smashed.

They had thought we were inside it, or at least they hadn't known we weren't. There had been no time to search the house. They had wanted us dead.

That sitting room, alive with books and greenery, all crisping and dying. The wallpaper curling and the curtains turned to sheets of flame. The alcove where we had crouched to watch the cars invading, fallen to the ground.

"It's all right," Eddie said in a low voice, before I could say anything. I suspected he had cut me off deliberately; I could feel him shaking and knew a stupid or sympathetic exclamation from me would push him over the edge. "It's all right, Richard got out, everything living got out, except the plants, and they can be grown again. The house doesn't matter. Just go, quick."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing I could say that wouldn't cut through his own attempts to hold himself together. I fumbled for the broom in the dark, found it, mounted it. Eddie got up behind me, and we turned the broom away from the glow and the heat, and into the night.