23

23

W e flew on the broomstick through the night, most of it in silence, taking it in turns to steer. Eddie was far better than me, having grown up flying his parents' old brooms, as opposed to having just learned that morning. We made much better time under his guidance, and it was a relief for me not to have to concentrate furiously every mile. But my limbs were still locked stiff, and I could relax very little without tumbling off the broomstick. It rained in earnest around midnight, and by the morning I was chilled and exhausted and my entire body was in agony. I was secretly glad we couldn't travel that way across the Channel. I'd be seriously afraid I would arrive in Paris unable to move.

Instead we caught the ferry, like every other ordinary citizen, and I paced the rain-speckled deck as we skimmed the water. Hero would reach Paris first, having started from Berlin days ago, and she presumably had the advantage of knowing where the lock was kept. We knew only that it was somewhere in the city, probably deep in the vaults of wherever the French equivalent to the Board, the Conseil, was located. There was a very good chance she would be crossing the Channel in the opposite direction already.

"Perhaps we should have gone straight to London," I said aloud. "We might have had a better chance of intercepting her before she breaks the lock then."

Eddie shook his head. "We can't just sit in London waiting for her to attack the Paris lock and come to us. The French Guards could kill her. She will certainly kill many of them. That's not the sort of thing you just… let happen, as a strategy."

"I suppose not."

I looked at him, pale and distracted, gripping the railing of the ship just a little too tightly. Despite his best efforts and the near-empty deck, the outside world was overwhelming him. It was what I was used to seeing at a nightclub or a crowded party, right when his tolerance for noise and conversation and the proximity of other bodies was pushing against his threshold and he would have to step outside. I remembered his warning that he had barely been among people since he had left Camford, and guilt squeezed my heart anew. I would have had the right thing to say to him once. Now there was too much that was uncertain and awkward hanging between us. It was strange that I only realised just how much I missed him when he was standing right next to me.

I tried to find an encouraging smile, which probably looked daft. "I'm sure Richard's safe."

Eddie managed a smile back. He never was good at pretending. "I'm sure he is too. The Guards won't have any reason to be hunting him."

The Guards wouldn't, it was true. We both knew that Alden would, if he wanted to get to Eddie. My own family were in danger for the same reason.

If Alden touched any of them, I swore I would kill him.

"We'll get there in time," Eddie added. "You'll see. Hero won't attack in Paris as soon as she arrives. The dryad's waited eight years—it will take the time to plan, now the Board know it's coming. Trees are patient."

It wasn't convincing, but the effort at least was comforting. We were both doing our best to mend what had broken between us.

"Yes," I agreed. "We'll get there first."

And in fact, we did. We had been in Paris nearly a full day before an explosion rocked the city.

We were a few miles away, at a café near the Tuileries. Lady Winter's old broomstick had taken us from Calais to Paris; we had checked into a motel that was only marginally less grubby and tired than we were, and Eddie had telephoned his cousin at the French Board to arrange a meeting. Understandably, his cousin was less than impressed at being phoned by a distant relation she barely knew, especially one the English Board was trying to find; she also, more worryingly, had the same rush and panic in her voice that had been in that of the telephone operator at the Boardroom the day word of the Berlin attack had reached Camford. But she had agreed to meet us for lunch in an hour on the Right Bank, and we had made ourselves as presentable as possible to join her.

"How well do you know Paris?" I asked Eddie, and he laughed.

"Me? I don't like cities, remember. My parents took us to the South of France when I was seven—we stopped here for a day. What about you?"

"I came here for a conference," I said. "Last summer."

It had felt important, that week-long conference. The streets were sunlit and crooked and charming; the Seine sparkled green brown, and the pale buildings with their twisted iron balustrades looked like illustrations from a picture book. The French university of magic was through a portal door off the Sorbonne, its white stone and ordered streets the polar opposite of Camford, and the Faculty there had welcomed us with open arms. With only a few exceptions, I was spoken to as though I was a scholar and not a scholarship witch; several fellow scholars came up after my paper to congratulate me and ask questions, and the conversation had flowed over into dinner and then into the night. I had dared to hope that I truly had made it.

"Well," Eddie said, before I could spiral any further. "I'll follow you, then."

He might have been oblivious to what was going on in my head, but from the quick smile he gave me, I doubted it.

There was an unsettled, restless air to Paris as we found the café, asked for a table in our hesitant French, and were seated with the waiter promising, in English, to be back soon. The sky was grey, yet the pavement exuded stormy heat. We sat without talking, keeping an eye on the street for Eddie's cousin, although he had only the vaguest idea what she looked like and I had none at all. And I kept an eye out, too, for anyone else that might be looking for us. The broomstick was inside my satchel once more—in desperate need, it could be used. Spells that might help us raced around my head, reflexive, ready to burst from my fingertips at the slightest twitch. It didn't feel enough.

"Do you think the Conseil is near here?" I asked once, just for something to say.

Eddie shrugged. The tight, anxious look had crept back into his face, and his feet were twitching uneasily under the table.

"Perhaps," he said. "Not too close, though. She won't want to be seen with us."

If I replied, I don't remember.

It was then that all of Paris shook.

The impact rattled the plates and glasses, sent the chairs skittering on the cobbles and customers leaping up with startled cries. Eddie and I looked at each other, eyes wide.

"She's here," I said.

Smoke and dust were rising in the distance, across the Seine, behind Notre Dame. By the time we had pushed back our chairs and stood, the screams had started.

The smoke was coming from across the city. The broom was too conspicuous, though I pulled it from my satchel and held it at the ready just in case. Instead, we flagged down a passing cab, argued furiously in a mixture of French and English to take us toward the commotion rather than away from it, and threw far too much of Eddie's money at the driver before he would carry us across the bridge. In the end it bought us only a little time. As we drove into the Latin Quarter, the traffic and the crowds coming the other way were so thick that they spilled across the road, and we were forced to get out and push through them as best we could. I heard words in lilting French, high with panic: explosion, bombing, war. Cracks like gunshots or fireworks split the air, and each time I flinched.

By then, it was obvious we were going to be too late. It was also obvious exactly where the lock had been.

I had visited the Panthéon during the conference last year. Matty had been to Paris on leave at the start of the war, and while he claimed he had mostly learned where best to get drunk, he had at least told me how spectacular that monument was. And it truly was. The ornate classical front loomed impossibly large, the Grecian columns as thick and tall as ancient trees; inside, the high ceilings, the blank-faced sculptures, the great swinging pendulum that had been marking time since the middle of last century, all pressed down on me with a hushed awe that felt indistinguishable from magic. Now the enormous domed roof had split apart as though cleaved by a giant axe, and the remains were a blazing wreck. Ash drifted slowly from the sky; smoke filled my lungs, harsh and acrid, and I coughed painfully.

I had read the reports of the bombing raids on London and Norfolk and the Midlands by German zeppelins in the war, seen the photographs and the public service posters, and in my visits to London I had witnessed the buildings still being repaired. The dust and the wreckage and the noise looked exactly as though a bomb had struck. There was just one difference. The site was covered with trees. A forest of silver birch rose up from the ground, cracking the cobbles apart. Ivy and bracken draped the rubble, as though it had lain as a ruin for centuries. It looked like Camford, I recognised, and once I had thought it, I couldn't shake it. The ground before us was littered with dead leaves.

It was littered with something else too, something more terrible. There was a dark shape draped over the wreckage, a coat or a bundle of old cloth; when I looked closer, rubbing the soot from my glasses, I saw with a chill that it had a face. A body. A human body. There was another lying discarded on the footpath beside the gardens; another being dragged out to join it. I had to stifle another cough, this time because my stomach curdled and bile rose in my throat.

At least I knew for certain now. Hero couldn't, and would never, do this. This was something else, something that had reached through and taken her. We had opened a door in the world, and this was what had spilled out. I thought I had realised it, but it hit me now like a stab to the heart. I couldn't breathe.

"Josephine," Eddie said quietly, and it took my dazed brain a moment to remember that this was the name of his cousin. "Do you think she was here?"

"No." I said it without thinking, grabbing for reasons to fit the answer, exactly as a scholar shouldn't. "No, she couldn't have been. She was coming to meet us. She wouldn't have been here."

He said nothing. I'm sure he knew that the answer I'd given him wasn't honest.

We were too late. The battle was over—the second lock was broken. The faerie had been right here, only moments before, and it had killed everyone and left before we had arrived. Such a narrow margin, and we had missed it.

And then I saw it. A figure, walking tall and straight-backed from the rubble, head held high and step brisk. I had last seen that figure eight years ago, watching from her car as we left to catch our train. I would have known it anywhere in the world.

"Hero!" I cried, as loudly as I could. "Hero, stop!"

Slowly, as if against her will, the figure faltered, turned. Through the crowds, she saw me.

The Hero in my memories had always been an adult, poised and sophisticated. In reality, though, she had been nineteen, little more than a girl, really, only months older than me. This Hero was grown. She was dressed in an elegant black suit, streaked with dust; her hair, fashionably short and crimped, framed a face that was still young and yet had hardened into something cooler and more austere. A faerie, I reminded myself, but it wasn't, or not entirely. There's a good deal of debate on where a host ends and a faerie begins in philosophy of magic, and I'd never quite seen the point. I did now. A faerie has no human body—the one it had now, by definition, was still Hero. In taking her form, it had in some very real way become her.

I had that one glimpse to take her in, as I assume she did me. Then she spoke. I recognised the high, wild lilt of the faerie tongue, and the ground beneath me erupted into twisting vines.

The suddenness and the scale of it was shocking; more to the point, it was wrong . Magic was secret. It always was, always had been, no matter who had needed to die to keep it that way. Now it was loose, tearing up the cobbles of the Latin Quarter, sending the crowds screaming and scattering as it streaked toward us like the flash of a snake. It stopped me still in my tracks, staring in horror, for just a moment too long. I raised my hands to strike back—with fire, with ice, with anything—and then the great tendrils were upon me.

They wrapped around my legs and then my body, pinning my arms to my side, and then they kept growing. My feet left the ground—I was being lifted in the air, suspended above the streets, almost to the roof of the ruined Panthéon. Beside me, I saw Eddie in the same position, struggling to no avail. The vines were the thickness of cord, and they blossomed with scarlet flowers. Their grip, though, was like the bite of iron.

I couldn't cast a spell. It wasn't just that my hands were bound, that my voice was constricted by the vines at my throat. Magic drained from me at the touch of the plant. It was like losing my hearing or my vision; I hadn't realised until that moment how accustomed I had become to something coursing through my veins and sparking in my fingertips, something that hadn't been there before Camford and now was in every beat of my heart. I panicked, gagging, thrashing wildly even as their hold clenched tighter and tighter. My glasses fogged; I couldn't draw breath; dark specks danced across a world grown pale and transparent.

"Don't fight!" Eddie's voice came to my right, muffled around the edges. "It'll relax if you do. Let it hold you."

It went against every instinct I had, but I had seen cats hunting mice often enough to grasp the sense in it. I stopped fighting the vines and started fighting myself. I closed my eyes, forced my limbs to stop thrashing, and tried to breathe evenly and slowly even as it felt my ribs would crack. In my head, as I often did when struggling to fall asleep at night, I went to the library roof at Camford. The four of us stretched out on sunbaked tiles, the crooked paths and buildings and canals far below, the university walls encircling us and shielding us from the mist beyond. Breathe. Just breathe.

Slowly, inch by inch, the vines relaxed their grip. I was still held, suspended high above the cobbles, but the hold was no longer painful. My breath came at last in ragged gasps, and for a moment the sweet rush of air filling my lungs blotted out everything else.

"What do you want, Clover Hill?" It was Hero's deep, beautiful voice, from Hero's body, but it wasn't Hero speaking. I could see it now, as she walked toward me glowing with faerie magic. "I fulfilled my bargain with you. You have your brother alive and well."

I could have pointed out that the faerie had had no intention of Matthew being alive or well. I didn't. It wasn't just that the accusation would be stupid. I didn't want the faerie thinking about Matthew.

"I want Hero," I said instead. I tried to sound firm when I was still struggling for breath. "We've come for our friend."

Her head tilted to one side. It wasn't Hero's gesture at all. I recognised with a chill the insectoid twist from the faerie we had held in the door.

"A little late now, isn't it? You left her to me for eight long years."

"We didn't leave her." It was ridiculous to be so defensive, I knew that even as I spoke. It was a faerie, it was being cruel on purpose, it didn't care—but the feelings of my eighteen-year-old self came back in a rush. "You took her."

"And you never even noticed."

"How could I? She drove us to the station and dropped us there, and then I never saw her again."

It hit me with a rush then, everything I had been trying not to picture. Hero pushing me to safety as the world buckled around us; her cry as the fae had sunk its talons into her flesh and burrowed into her mind. Hero trapped in her own body, screaming at us to see her as the train pulled away. Year after year, moment after moment, watching while her body was used by something alien, realising that we were never going to come.

Had I really not suspected, even for a moment? Eddie had guessed, after all. Alden had convinced himself that nothing was wrong. Had I done the same, without even having the honesty to lie to myself about it?

"You kept her away," I said. "You let me believe she blamed me, so I wouldn't see what had really happened to her."

"It wasn't for that reason," the faerie in Hero's body said. The words felt involuntary somehow.

"Why, then?"

There was a hesitation, the tiniest breath before she spoke that felt human and not fae. "She bargained."

"Who did?" It came to me a beat too late, in a painful rush. "Hero. Hero bargained. She made you leave us alone."

"If I'd been worried you would see the truth, I would have killed you all. I might have done it anyway, just to be safe. But she fought me, every breath. It would have meant nothing in the end, but her will was strong. Fighting back takes time, and as long as I was in her body, hurting her meant hurting myself. If I left you three alone, she agreed to stay quiet. She's been quiet for years now. I'm not sure how much of her is left. And it didn't matter, did it? None of you noticed; even now, too late, most of the world believes this is truly her."

Shame coursed through me, hot and bitter. I had failed her not once, but twice, perhaps many times over. We had all failed one another, in so many ways.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Hero? If you can hear me, we're going to save you."

"Don't talk to her," the faerie hissed, and the vines tightened about my throat. I gasped, and heard Eddie do the same. Beneath us, the broken shell of the Panthéon swam before my eyes, all but deserted now and entwined with vines. "I told you, she's barely there anymore. I'm not worried about any fight she'll put up if I snap you in two right now."

I didn't believe it: She would have done it already, and she certainly wouldn't be worried about me talking to Hero. Still, I fell silent, for Hero's sake. I'd said what I'd needed to say to her.

"Why are you doing this?" Eddie spoke up. "Perhaps we can bargain."

Her laugh was Hero's laugh, and it twisted my heart. "You? You have nothing that I could possibly want."

"What do you want?" I asked. "Does it have something to do with why you killed so many people at Amiens?"

I wished, more than ever, that faerie scholarship had not been forbidden. I knew so little about how the fae behaved, even with Lady Winter's library. But Matthew had been right, and so had Eddie. This was not a usual dryad. I could see it in her face now, feel it in the thorns pressing my skin. She hated us.

"I killed those people at Amiens for the same reason I killed Hero's husband and everyone who tried to stop me in Berlin and now here," the faerie said. "They were in the way."

"In the way of what?" I asked. "Why do you want the locks broken?"

She said nothing.

"The fae aren't usually murderous," I pressed, and felt the vines creep up to my cheek. I swallowed and kept on. "They're tricksters. If they steal human bodies, it's because they want to experience our world—"

"I don't want your world," she spat. "Look what you've done to it. Paved it over, torn it up, poisoned it. I want my world. I want the piece of it you carved out hundreds of years ago. I want what was stolen."

This was new, and unexpected. My heart quickened. "What do you mean? What was stolen?"

Hundreds of years ago. We may not learn faerie magic at Camford, but we certainly teach history of modern magic, and even folklore is rich with tales founded on true events. I rifled through my brain, frantic, trying to think of any faerie deal that had gone wrong hundreds of years ago.

"Did someone trick you into giving them an object?" I tried. "A cloak, or a sword, or…?"

"I don't care about foolish trinkets! And I'm not talking about deals or tricks. I'm talking about theft." The vines around us flexed, trembled. "Stay out of my way, you two, or I will break my promise to Hero and take the consequences. This has nothing to do with you."

I should have stopped. As usual, I persisted. "Perhaps we can help. What has nothing to do with us? What was taken from you?"

"Clover," Eddie warned me, softly. It was too late. Hero's face had hardened; her lips drew back over her teeth in a low, sharp hiss.

" Get away from me ," she snarled, and then the vines cracked like a whip and there was nothing holding us in the air.

I truly don't know if she meant to kill us. My instinct is no. I think her heart was shrieking, her barriers were cracking; I pushed a fraction too far, too keen as usual for information and too sharp, and the faerie wanted to fling us both as far and as fast from her as she could. But that is scant comfort when the ground is coming up to meet you very fast.

My stomach shot into my throat; my limbs were horribly weightless. The Panthéon flashed in photographic stills before my eyes: pale blue sky, dead leaves, columns, tree roots breaking through cobbles. Eddie, beside me, eyes wide with horror. My arms windmilled, frantic, trying to cling to something, anything. There was nothing.

Except, still in my hand, the broomstick that Lady Winter had given me.

It was barely a stick now. The vines had cracked it in two; the twigs at one end were scattered over the ground. Yet it was warm in my hand, and in desperation I found the breath and the presence of mind to yell the word for flight.

The broom heard me. It stopped still in midair, quivering and trembling. My arm caught, my shoulder wrenched, and I clung on with one hand as tight as I could. With the other I reached out, grabbed for Eddie's hand, missed—and, right as my heart cried no , snagged his jacket.

I was a fraction past the last possible second, or perhaps I caught it exactly. Eddie came to a sharp stop in midair, limbs jerking like a marionette's, before his coat slipped from my grasp and he fell the remaining few feet to the ground. I heard a sickening crack as his head struck the cobbles, and a faint cry that choked off to nothing.

"No!" I heard my own voice without recognising it. I landed, stumbled, then sank to my knees and crawled over to Eddie. Please, please let him not be dead. Not him too, not because of me, please…

He wasn't. When I reached him, he was already stirring, turning over, raising his hand to his forehead with a wince. There was blood above one eyebrow and the beginnings of a bruise already, but not the broken skull I had feared. I had, after all, slowed his fall enough.

"I'm all right," he mumbled, dazed, as I checked him over. "No, I'm fine, really. Are you hurt?"

"You're not fine, you clod." I deliberately ignored the question, because if I thought about it, I suspected I was. Beneath the adrenaline, I could feel agony lurking along my arm and shoulder, waiting to surface, and I was trembling. "But I don't think it's very bad. Can you get up? We need to get out of here."

There was no sign of Hero any longer. The vines that still entangled the Panthéon were as immobile as any other plant. She was gone. Sooner or later, people would trickle cautiously back to the wreckage, looking for survivors. If any of them happened to be Guards, we were in serious trouble—

"I'm fine." Eddie's voice was firmer now, and he pulled himself up with barely a wobble. "Come on. People are looking."

They were: a crowd of stunned spectators, drawing timidly close to the broken monument, looking with wonder at the vines twisting up the columns. One or two, in the front of the line, were already pointing toward us. I didn't know if any of them were Guards, or the French equivalent of Guards. If they weren't here yet, they would be soon. I shook myself firmly.

"Hold tight," I said to Eddie, and offered my poor, faithful, fragmentary broomstick. He clasped it, his hand nudging mine, and I raised it in the air and gave the word. We rose, dangling from a broken stick of wood, up into the Paris sky.