24

24

I t was too late.

The words echoed in my head, even as my body managed to do quite normal things. Alight out of sight, cast a quick charm to cover our tracks so that anybody passing through the area in the next quarter hour would forget they had seen us. Take the metro to the Gare du Nord—there was no point in staying in Paris now, when Hero had what she came for. She would be headed straight to London. We had to do the same.

"Do you have money to get back to England?" I asked Eddie briskly.

"Enough for the crossing." His head was still bleeding, and he was looking very white and dizzy. "Not enough to get out to Calais as well. Clover—"

"Never mind." It was too late. Even if we could get there in time, it was still too late. It had been too late years ago. "We'll improvise. Hold on tight."

We lighted on the roof of a west-bound train, with the very last feeble spark of the broom's magic, and we slipped inside a carriage packed with trunks and luggage and crates. It was leaving Paris, rattling over miles of French countryside, back the way we had come, as though in mockery of our long journey to get here. I didn't care. The words were still ricocheting through my brain, and when I stopped moving, they exploded.

I sank down against a huge leather trunk covered in yellowing labels and closed my eyes against the dim light as the carriage shuddered gently around me, utterly miserable and utterly spent. My head throbbed, my body ached, and I felt shivery and exhausted as though I had the flu. I didn't care about that either. All I could see, whether my eyes were open or shut, was Paris split apart, the Panthéon wreathed in vines, Eddie falling through the air. Hero's body being worn by the creature we had summoned, so many years ago.

As long as we were still on this earth there was nothing that couldn't be fixed. I had believed that, had clung to it through years of war and sickness and beyond. But we couldn't fix this. The sight of faerie magic tearing up Paris had blown away any illusions I had managed to cling to. It was too big for us—that was why the faerie had broken through in the first place, when we were stupid, thoughtless children pretending to be scholars, and it was why we could never hope to put it back now. It was too late to fix anything. The only thing we could have done was never let it break in the first place.

"Clover?" I felt Eddie's hand on my shoulder, then heard a slight catch of breath. "You're hurt."

I opened my eyes and glanced down, with effort. Blood had seeped through the dressing on my arm and through the sleeve of my coat. "Oh. That wasn't from Hero. That's where Lady Winter took the tracking spell from me, a few days ago. It must have opened, I suppose." I hadn't even thought about it since leaving Pendle Hill. Lady Winter had given me firm instructions to change the dressing every few days, but I hadn't had the time or the inclination.

"Let me see."

It hurt to move, much less to ease out of the coat I had been wearing for days, and all I really wanted was to curl up and not think. Eddie was gently insistent, though, and I let him pull down the sleeve of my blouse to expose my upper arm and unwrap the greying dressing.

Whatever he saw made him wince. "No wonder you look rubbish."

I had to laugh, though I suddenly felt closer to tears. "Oh, thanks. You're not looking so clever yourself, you know."

"I just got a bump on the head. It's nothing. I've done worse to myself falling out of trees. That, though, looks like it needs a bit of cleaning, and then a bit of magic. Do you mind?"

I shrugged the shoulder that didn't feel like it was burning up, a little surprised. "Go ahead. Have you done this before?"

"Well," he conceded, "not on humans. But Richard and I nursed a baby fox back to health last winter, so…"

My laugh this time was more real. "Oh, say no more. I'm in good hands."

I was too. His satchel opened; from it came a first aid kit, exactly the sort of thing I was always forgetting, and he patched up the bleeding gash in my arm as deftly as Lady Winter had done a few nights before. Instead of putting on a fresh dressing, though, he pulled out a specimen box with a single flower inside. The bloom was deep scarlet with a faint purple tip. It looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn't place it.

"This is a rose from Camford," he answered my unspoken question. "The same kind that helped your brother. Do you mind if I use it?"

"No, please." I looked at it, interested and wary despite myself. "What does it do?"

"Nothing on its own, it turns out. It senses and enhances magic—faerie magic, especially, which was why it reacted so strongly to your brother's curse. It should help with this as well, if I talk to it right."

"Are you a hedgewitch now?"

I was teasing, cautiously, and I was rewarded with an echo of his old lopsided smile. "Unfortunately not. One came to the house in winter, though, and stayed with us for the coldest weather in exchange for teaching me all she knew. They're miles ahead of Camford when it comes to herbs and potions. Hold still, please."

He pulled off a dark leaf and laid it against my arm, muttering the same healing charm Lady Winter had used. The leaf burned with a sting like a nettle; I hissed on reflex, but when Eddie glanced at me, I nodded to keep going. Beneath the sting, the pain and the dull heat was ebbing, and my thoughts were clearing in their wake. Besides, I trusted him.

"I was worried you'd given up research for good," I said. "When you left Camford."

"Oh no. Never. You don't need a university to learn. Though admittedly it does help. I've bought a lot of books; I would have got a lot further and faster with the Camford Library. There." He pulled the leaf away. "How does that feel?"

"Much better. Thank you." It really did, I discovered as I flexed it. The heavy exhaustion had lifted, and the sting in my upper arm had eased to a faint, muffled throb. I saw before Eddie wrapped it again that the inflammation had faded. I felt less shivery, too, though that hadn't all been the wound. The blaze of those green eyes in Hero's face was still seared into my brain.

Eddie's face was troubled. "I can't believe Alden did that to you," he said. "I knew he would lie to hide what we'd done, but—not this. Not to you. Not to Hero either."

"We don't know how much any of this came from him directly," I reminded him, without much conviction. "It might have got away from him."

"Still. I'm sorry I called him to the house. And I'm sorry I didn't try to do more for Hero all those years ago, when I suspected what had happened." Those eyes were clearly still burning in his head too.

" I'm sorry." This time, at least, it sounded sincere. "I let you down."

Eddie shook his head firmly. "I never thought that."

"I knew you were struggling, that last term at Camford. I knew something wasn't right. I should have asked more questions."

"I wouldn't have given you answers then. I was angry at you, I suppose, but mostly I was worried for you. You aren't Family, and neither you nor your brother was ever safe. If things were as bad as I feared, I didn't want you anywhere near them."

Guilt squeezed my chest. I had said the same thing to Alden about Eddie, in London, and yet when it came to it, I hadn't hesitated to draw him back in. "You always were a better friend to me than I was to you."

"No. It wasn't like that." He paused, frustrated, trying to find the right words. "It wasn't about being a good friend , as though it was a duty I'd taken on, and because I had it was your duty to be one back. Everything I did with you, or for you, I did because I wanted to, because I liked you. I don't like a lot of people, you know. You didn't owe me anything in return."

"I liked you too." It felt inadequate, but the simplicity of it also felt right. "Very much. I knew you were a better person than Alden. I don't know why that doesn't matter when you're eighteen."

"Oh, I liked him too," Eddie said matter-of-factly. "And you had more excuse than me. He admired you, truly, everyone could see it. He never did me. We were friends when we were children because I was dropped off at his house and told to play with him and Hero. He looked after me at Crawley and then at Camford because he felt sorry for me, and perhaps because he could see that in those days I was a little bit in love with him. I'm not sure he ever even liked me."

"He did—he still does." Perhaps I was deluding myself, wanting our summer at Ashfield to be real. I was very capable of delusion where Alden was concerned, apparently. And yet I had seen the look on Alden's face when he had told me we were the only people he had ever loved. It had been an apology, I knew now, for what he was about to do. But he had meant it. "He just isn't going to let it stop him."

Stop him doing what, though, was the question. The easiest answer was simply that Alden was trying to preserve his career, his name, his entire way of life. It was what Lady Winter believed, and it was convincing—I had come close to doing the same, all those years I had put Ashfield behind me, looked the other way, and focused on my academic path. I just couldn't quite believe it of him, even now. He was selfish, ruthless even; he wasn't shallow. Surely if he was going to throw us all away, he needed something better than that. What did he want?

What, for that matter, did the faerie want?

"Clover?"

It was the hesitation in Eddie's voice rather than my name that snagged my attention. I looked at him, inquiring.

"That flower I just used," he said, with a nod at my arm. "The roses that grow in Camford. There's something you should know about them."

"What is it?"

"I saw them on the vines that Hero just used to bind us. They're the same flowers."

My thoughts had been very far from flowers. It took a moment for his words to catch up. "What do you mean, the same?"

"I mean that I haven't seen these roses anywhere except Camford before. Nobody has. I thought they were regular roses, that growing in Camford had changed them. All the plants in Camford are slightly off. But today—the flowers on those vines were the same."

"How can they be?" I asked slowly. "I mean… Are you sure?"

I already knew the answer. When it came to plants, Eddie had always been sure.

The look he gave me confirmed it. "They were holding me suspended in midair, Clover. I got a pretty good look at them. I just don't know what it means."

Something was forming, coalescing. It was my favourite moment of research, the moment when a thousand fragments come together in a blinding flash that illuminates everything. This one I wasn't sure I wanted to see by, but out of sheer stubborn habit, I grasped for the fragments.

This, I reminded myself, was what knowledge was for. Not to bend to our own purpose and our own ambitions, the way we had when we were young. To find the truth, even when that truth is something you wish could be different.

"They respond to magic, you said?"

"Faerie magic, particularly," Eddie said. "The wise woman who stayed at our house thought they might be faerie plants. But that didn't make any sense to me at the time."

And then, all at once, I saw.

The trees that grew around Camford, ash and oak and wild roses. The mists outside the Camford walls, the locked gate, the doors that we stepped through every day when no two places on earth could be connected that way.

I don't want your world , the faerie that was Hero had said. I want my world. I want what was stolen.

"It's Camford," I said slowly. "The doors we pass through to reach Camford, at Oxford or Cambridge—they're faerie doors. That's where Camford is. Camford is built on faerie ground."

"But—" Eddie shook his head, bewildered, and winced. "The doors leading to faerie country were all closed and sealed after the Accord. Ashfield only escaped because it had been opened during the war, in secret. If the Oxbridge was a faerie door, we wouldn't be able to enter the university at all."

"Except that every faerie door is twofold." The words were tumbling too fast to stop, trying to keep up with my thoughts. "There's an inner door and an outer door, remember? The Camford door is still open at our side—that's how we get in. The other side—the dangerous side, the faerie side—is closed. It has been for centuries, long before the Accord."

"The door set into the wall surrounding Camford is always locked." Eddie looked very white—though that might have been the blow to the head. "And nothing can be seen beyond it except mist. But the space between doors is supposed to be tiny. A millionth of the width of a hair."

"Usually. This one is the precise size of a university. Once you have a spell, stretching it a little isn't so difficult."

"Why, though? You can build a university anywhere. Why would you go to all that trouble to build one on faerie ground?"

"I don't know, not yet. But that would explain why nobody is ever allowed to know where Camford is. It would explain why you were always deterred from studying the plants that grow there, do you remember? They were the only thing that gave it away. They're faerie plants."

"Hero always thought they knew more about the faerie at Amiens than they were telling," Eddie said slowly. "That's why they were so quick to shut down faerie magic. They knew, or at least suspected, why a dryad might go to such effort to break through to our world, and how dangerous it would be if she succeeded."

"It's nothing in our world she wants at all. She's trying to break down the wall between the worlds and find something at Camford. Not her tree—she'd have died long ago without it, and besides, there are no birch trees at Camford." I could say that with confidence—birch trees were something I noticed, given Matthew's curse. "But there's something we stole along with the land, and she wants it back."

Eddie was silent for a long time. "Oh God," he said at last.

Camford. My home, the haven of knowledge I loved, the place that despite everything I had believed existed especially for me. I had been there my entire adult life, trying to dig up answers about the heart of magic, and I had missed what was buried right under my feet. I had wondered about Camford's location, and then dismissed it, because I'd wanted to fit in. I had grown up in the heat of the dryad's anger and its consequences—my brother's curse, Alden's brother's disappearance, Hero's possession, the trail of destruction she was leaving now in her wake—and I had never tried to find out what might have earned that anger. I was used to feeling stupid—it was the first step to knowledge, I always told my students—but this was different. I had been the worst kind of scholar, the kind who accepts answers without even realising there are questions to ask.

"We need to get there." Eddie's voice pulled me back. His grey-blue eyes were steady, and I tried to let them steady me too. This was the Eddie I remembered, the one who accepted immediately the situation we were in and only looked for what he could do to help. Amidst everything, I felt a flash of shame that the very things that sent me into despair were the things that brought him back. "If Hero's going to Camford, we need to get there first."

I found my voice again. "The Board must know where she's going. They'll evacuate the university. We won't be able to get in."

"The Camford Faculty will help, surely. You're a scholar. They respect you."

"Some of the other scholars do, I hope. Not the Faculty. They've never liked me."

I could say it without sting now. It wasn't as though I hadn't known it from the first. All those long, tiresome fights over grants, the struggle to get even one teaching appointment, the regulations about women scholars that were outdated by the standards of most universities in the world. I had spent so many years shaping myself into what they had wanted me to be, and all it had done was annoy them. They had been delighted when Hero left; they must have been downright thrilled when the two of us were declared criminals.

"Never mind them, then." It was a verbal shrug. Eddie didn't exactly not care what people thought of him—I'm not sure that's possible—but he cared less than anyone I knew. "Is there anyone else who could get us in?"

I racked my brains, trying to channel Eddie's focus. Never mind them. Never mind. "Sam might. He isn't high on the Board, but he knows things. With any luck, Matthew and Lady Winter should have cornered him by now. He might be able to get us in."

"Then that's what we'll do," Eddie said. "We'll go to London as we planned, and we'll go to Sam for help. If we can't stop her in London itself, he can get us into Camford."

"That sounds like a plan." I didn't say that we might still be too late. That even if we did reach Camford, our conversation might not go any better than last time—if anything, it could be worse. My one faint hope had been to save Hero by bargaining for her release. If the faerie made it to Camford, she already had what she wanted.

"We can't just do nothing," I said out loud.

"No," Eddie agreed, as though he had heard everything I had left unspoken. "Not with Hero being held by that dryad. Not now that we've seen it for ourselves. Of course we can't. And it's more than just Hero, isn't it?"

"Yes." I rested my head back against the wall and closed my eyes against the rattle of the train. I was so tired that I felt weightless, thrown about inside the carriage like a loose piece of luggage. "God, Eddie, what did they do, all those centuries ago, that made that faerie hate us so much? Why build a university on faerie ground at that kind of cost?"

"We'll find out." He settled beside me, and in the midst of everything, his shoulder was a comforting warmth against mine. "We're scholars. It's our job."

We came back across the Channel on the early ferry and arrived in Dover to a bright, cold English morning. My limbs had steadied by then, and my nerves with them. My thoughts had found their old wartime groove. We weren't defeated yet. Until the moment we heard the third lock had been broken, we still had time. That could be the very next moment, it was true, but it wasn't here yet. Eddie went to find tickets for the nearest train to London, while I hurried to check the office for a message. I had sent Lady Winter a telegram from Calais; she should have had a chance to reply by now, however cryptically.

My heart was beating a little less rapidly by the time I got back to Eddie.

"Richard's safe," I said, without preamble. "Lady Winter left a message. He reached her and gave her our news."

Days' worth of tension flooded from his body at once, and the first real smile I'd seen in all those days lit his face. I couldn't help but smile in return.

"Good," he said, inadequately. "That's good. How about your brother? Has he reached Sam yet?"

"She said Sam would be ready to talk to us when we arrived. And since she didn't mention London being in ruins, it seems Hero isn't there yet."

"Good," he said again. "Well. I have our tickets. The train will be boarding soon."

Another train journey. It was better than a broomstick, I supposed, but I wasn't sure I could bear the enforced stillness. I had no choice.

Perhaps it was the thought of that train ride that did it—the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to put through a call until we reached London, and then it would be too dangerous and too late. Either way, I glanced at the telephone box on the station platform, and I faltered.

"I need to make a call," I said, before I could change my mind. "Would you mind waiting, just a minute?"

Eddie was startled, but he hid it well. "No, of course not. Is it…?" He trailed off. "Never mind. As long as we don't miss the train."

"We won't. This will just be a second."

I wasn't sure I even remembered the number for Ashfield. I had never called it, after all, only given it to my family a very long time ago. But I'd always had a good memory for number sequences, and I remembered everything about Ashfield. I imagined my call racing across the country, travelling through the wires, through the little hills and rivers of Oxfordshire toward the leaden skies and wild moorland of the north. It was hard to remember, these days, where magic ended and technology began.

A click on the other end, and then a voice, deep and efficient. I wondered if it was Morgan—it had been a long time, and voices sounded different on the telephone. "Hello, this is the butler at Ashfield Manor."

"Hello." I pitched my own voice a little lighter, more formal. My hands were slick with perspiration against the receiver. "Could I speak to Mr. Lennox-Fontaine, please? It's urgent."

It was far more likely that Alden was at his office in London, awaiting developments there. That was his job, as minister for magical enforcement. And yet I wasn't surprised when the butler said, "One moment, please."

Alden must have been waiting for a phone call—probably many of them. His reply was swift, and despite the earliness of the hour it had the brisk efficiency of someone prepared for a colleague on the other end. "Hello?"

"Alden," I said. "It's me."

I don't know what reply I expected. There was none. Silence rang in my ear, the still, frozen silence of a wild thing that knows it has been seen. Only the faintest crackle of static let me know that he was still there and breathing.

"Clover," he said at last.

The telephone at Ashfield was on the first floor corridor, or it had been in my day. I imagined Alden standing there now, amidst the oak panelling and oil paintings and the low slanted beams of sunlight.

"Do you still have nightmares at Ashfield?" I heard myself ask.

"Do you care?"

"I hope you do. You deserve them."

"I do."

I meant this to be a quick conversation. One last chance, and then gone before he could call anyone at the Board or work out where I was phoning from or get under my skin. But he was already under my skin, embedded somewhere deep along with Hero and Eddie and Camford and that summer at Ashfield. It was too late.

"What did you tell the first minister after I left your apartment, Alden?" I asked. "That I was helping Hero? That we were what came of women being educated at the hallowed halls of Camford?"

"No." A faint sigh, as if he'd sat, or leaned back against a wall. "That was what he told the rest of the Board, and the papers. I told him more or less what I promised to tell him. I spun you a few lies that evening, I'll admit; that wasn't one of them. The first minister already knew that Hero was possessed by a faerie—that much was obvious from the curse. I told him that it had likely happened during our university days, that I had been involved, and so had you. I told him that you had been to my house and intended to tell others. As I foresaw, he wanted to leave my name out of it."

"Nobody wants a scandal this close to elections." My mouth was dry.

"Exactly. I'm too valuable where I am and too dangerous anywhere else, and of course he knows my father. Besides, I was hardly going to tell anybody. You were a different story. The Board wanted you silenced."

"Do you expect me to accept that? That it wasn't your doing, and you didn't know it would happen?"

"No. I'm telling you that I didn't lie to the first minister. Of course I knew what would happen when I told him the truth. I've lived in this world too long not to know how it works. I needed you out of the way too. For what little it may be worth, I wouldn't have done it if you hadn't come forward, and I did what I could to keep Eddie out of it. If you hadn't gone to him, he still wouldn't be involved. Is he with you now?"

I knew better than to answer that. "That is indeed worth very little." I let my voice drip with irony. "Considering you destroyed his house without knowing if we were inside it."

"Yes." A moment of uncharacteristic silence. "Tell him I'm sorry about that. It wasn't my decision. I'm only the minister for magical enforcement, not the Board. A lot of things are out of my control."

My hand tightened painfully on the receiver. "You know, I truly believed you when you said your political career wasn't what mattered to you."

"You were right to. It isn't."

"Then why?" It was what I'd really phoned to ask, after all. "What do you need us out of the way for ? Why are you doing this, Alden?"

"The same reason I opened the door eight years ago—the same reason I did any of it. I want to put things right, the way they should have been if I hadn't made one foolish mistake when I was twelve years old. I was never like Hero, you know. I never wanted to change the world. I just wanted it back the way it used to be, before everything fell apart."

That, of all things, I understood. My voice softened only a little, but it softened. "It's too late for that."

"It's too late for some things, I know. Not for everything, not yet." He paused. "I never meant to draw you or Hero or Eddie into this, all those years ago. Please believe that."

"This isn't about what you meant to do," I said. "It isn't even about what you did by accident. Everybody makes mistakes. It's about what you did afterwards. And what you did was protect yourself at the cost of everybody else. It's what you've always done, but this time you were old enough to know better."

"I know," he said simply.

I drew a deep breath, forced calm. "If you really want to fix this, then let's fix it together. We're going to put it right, Alden. Eddie and I. And God knows you don't deserve it, but you should be with us. Forget the Board, and your family, or whatever else you have in mind. Please come and help. For Hero's sake, if for nothing else."

"I wish I could." He genuinely seemed to mean that. On his next sentence, though, his voice had shifted. "Clover, are you and Eddie on your way to Camford?"

"Are you going to help us?" I countered, as quickly as I could. I told myself he couldn't possibly read anything from my answer. Even if I'd given myself away, he would wonder if I'd done it on purpose to allay suspicion. Whatever he suspected, he couldn't stop us.

His sigh was a burst of static down the phone. "I can help you this much, at least. Don't go to Camford. I know what the faerie wants there, and you can't give it to them."

"What?" Now my heart was racing for a different reason. "What does she want?"

"I can't say any more," he said, very carefully, "because when I took office I accepted a binding curse before I learned this secret, and if I break it, my heart will quite literally break too. But it's best you leave this alone."

"You know more than what the dryad wants," I said. "Something happened when Camford was created, didn't it? Something terrible, something the Board are trying desperately to hide. You know what it is."

"Yes. Yes, I know now. And I'm sorry about it, but it wasn't my doing. It was centuries before I was even born, for God's sake. Our world was built on the back of it, and we can't undo it without bringing everything crashing down. Believe me, you've a stake in this too. If you go near Camford, you'll only see I'm right."

I found a painful laugh. " Believe you? Are you truly expecting me to believe you about anything ever again?"

I heard the soft, sideways smile in his voice. "Perhaps not. It's true nonetheless. Clover—"

I hung up. I had nothing more to say, and there was nothing more Alden could say to me that I wanted to hear.

Eddie was waiting for me outside the telephone box. He must have known who I'd been talking to, but he didn't mention it.

"The train's coming in now," he said instead. "They're saying we'll make good time to London."

"Good," I said, just as Eddie had. My eyes were burning. I ignored them. "Let's go."