26

26

I had stepped through the door to Camford hundreds of times—thousands. I knew the cooling of the air, the playful gust of wind, the way the university opened in front of me as though I'd come out of a tunnel. This was like nothing I had ever felt before. The ground dropped from beneath my feet. My stomach plunged. Wind tore at my skirts, ice-cold, bringing with it a blast of rain and stone and leaf. I grabbed Eddie's hand in the dark and felt him snatch at mine.

Then, with a stumble as though we'd missed a step in the dark, we were on the other side. Camford lay sprawled before me, its beloved stone towers and crooked streets and winding river as empty as they had been that Christmas break when Alden and I had first broken the rules. Despite everything, it hit me like the glad swell of a wave that I was finally, once again, home. I had feared at times I would never see it again.

There was something different. Something missing. My dazed brain was still fumbling for it when Eddie spoke.

"The gate." His voice sounded strange, numb, barely there. "It's open."

It was. Normally the long, high wall would encircle the university, its gates barred across the mist that lay beyond. Now those gates were ripped apart. They sagged on their hinges, ragged and rough as though they had been clawed by a tiger. The gap in the wall was sickening and startling as a missing tooth. Beyond it lay faerie country.

I had glimpsed it once before, that night we had unleashed the faerie, the moment the door had opened just a little too far. A great, grey-green country, all woodland and thorns and scarlet roses tinged in purple, stretched as far as the eye could see. The wind that always buffeted Camford was stronger now, tearing through the wall and beating at the buildings; the trees and overgrowth tugged and twisted in it, and the rustling of their branches filled the air like a whispered language. And everywhere, even in the light of day, that strange moonlight glow.

"She's already here." I crossed my arms tight against the sudden chill. "Do you see? She doesn't need to come through one of the Camford doors as long as that gate's open. Faerie country is her home. She can make a door to it anywhere, and then make her way across to Camford. She came through that gate as soon as the lock was broken."

He nodded slowly, taking it in without visible fear. But I saw his hands curl into fists at his sides. "Then where is she?"

"I don't know," I said. "We'll find her."

Before I could think too hard about what I was doing, I turned and pressed Sam's ring to the door.

" Beclysan ," I said clearly, and felt it lock beneath my touch.

It wouldn't keep everybody out—probably other members of the Board could unlock it. With all that had happened in London, though, I imagined it would take the Board a while to get to the door, and they would be less than inclined to open it when they did. In the meantime, Sam couldn't. I didn't put it past Matthew to change his mind about not following us through, and if he did, Sam would be at his side. This way, whatever happened, it was just the three of us.

Eddie's eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing about it. He understood.

"You're right," he said. "We'll find her."

Camford felt different as we picked our way through the deserted streets. When I had passed through it that first Christmas I had come back alone, the plants and stones had seemed half-asleep—waiting, I had thought, for the cold to pass and the students to come back. Now, perhaps, they had what they were truly waiting for. They quivered with life, hungry and eager. The trees lining the pathways thrashed their branches and rustled their leaves in ways that had nothing to do with the wind; the grass and vines underfoot shivered. Once, unexpectedly, a thread of ivy snaked out and snatched at my arm. I flinched back. Eddie at once spoke a spell I didn't know, and the plant withdrew, entwining once more about the lamppost where it grew.

I let out a shaky breath. "Thanks. Where did that spell come from?"

"It was just a calming spell. It's more about—the voice, I suppose. You know how to get a spell to work, you have to hit a particular tone? There's a tone—a timbre of magic—that plants can hear. I've spent a lot of time finding it, that's all. It's not usually so dramatic. Usually I just get the vegetables to grow better."

I couldn't help but smile, albeit nervously. "Do you think they'll listen to you this time when we meet Hero?"

"No. She's a dryad. Their loyalty is to her, as it should be. We're the interlopers."

That was what I felt, with every step, deeper and deeper into the university I loved. Every leaf, every branch, every blade of grass was watching me as though I no longer belonged. Not hostile, at times even curious, but wary, and dangerous. They would kill me if they were asked.

We were drawing near to the centre of the university when Eddie grabbed my arm and pulled me back. My heart flew to my throat; I looked around, expecting to see Hero. But there was nothing—nothing, at least, that I could see. As usual, Eddie noticed more.

"A birch tree," he said quietly.

I followed his nod, and there it was. I could see the leaves and the tops of the branches peeking over the buildings. There was no birch tree in Camford.

"That's the quad," I said. "Come on—slowly."

Hero wasn't in the quad. We saw that as soon as we drew near, coming through the odd little alley behind the Buttery, trying not to make a sound. What was there was far, far worse.

It was Grimoire. He lay on the ground, arms outstretched, head thrown back and glassy eyes staring up at the sky. His face was still and bloodless, strangely peaceful, the lips parted as if about to speak. I had seen death before—this looked different. I might have run to his side to look for signs of life had it not been for the slim trunk of a birch tree erupting through his chest.

I couldn't move. Horror rooted me to the ground; disbelief shuddered in great waves through my nerves, my blood, bone deep and then deeper. The ward of the Camford Library couldn't be dead. Despite what I knew of his name and background, he had never seemed flesh and blood enough to die. He had been a creature of paper and dust, moving around the great labyrinth of shelves as though a part of it, the magic that we had glimpsed the night we had tried to break into the archives always rippling somewhere beneath his skin. It was wrong to see him lying out in the open, under a cloudy sky, the life drained from his body.

His heart pierced by a tree. That shadowed my shock at seeing Grimoire dead: the knowledge that this was the death three hundred had died at Amiens, the death that had been trying to burrow its way through Matthew all those long years after the war. I had never seen it before, the curse I had endangered the whole world to break. Yet again, the conviction came to me that this was far too big and powerful for any of us to stop.

Eddie recovered first. I felt rather than heard him draw a quick breath, brace himself, and go to Grimoire's side. He took up his wrist to feel for a pulse, clearly without much expectation, and then closed the librarian's eyes with a hand that shook only a little.

"She killed him," I said. The words weren't a question, or a statement. They just came of their own volition.

"Yes." Eddie got to his feet slowly, his face stark white. "His ring is gone," he added, almost as an afterthought.

He was right. Grimoire's left hand lay on the ground with the palm facing upwards, as if supplicating. The long white fingers were bare. A flicker came to me: Alden holding that same ring, that night at the archives that had seemed so dangerous and exciting and now just felt ridiculous. The night we had felt the books come alive and heard the inhuman howl.

You became a ward by taking the ring of the old ward, after their death.

I had to swallow hard before I could speak.

"The library," I said. "She's gone to the library."

It was easy to find the way she had gone.

The blue doors of Camford were locked down, able to open only to Camford graduates. It hadn't stopped her. The enormous door at the entrance to the library had been ripped open; when we ventured in, we saw another door torn from its hinges. We followed the trail of broken doors and scattered books, deeper and deeper, until we came to the great circular dome at the heart of the library.

Without the usual bustle of students and lecturers passing through, browsing the shelves, studying in clusters under the great oak, the hall looked cavernous and empty. Through the glass ceiling, the light came grey through the clouds and cast the room into shadow. The floors and shelves were entwined as usual with thorned vines; the great oak, magnificent as ever, spread its arms over the paved ground.

Beneath it, the faerie that was Hero stood, head tilted back to look up into the branches. For a second, the last time I had seen her in Paris still sharp and vivid in my mind, I didn't recognise her. She was barefoot, her hair had fallen loose about her face, and her fashionable dark suit was torn to rags. Her exposed skin was bruised and caked with dirt, and blood seeped from a cut on her cheek. She had fought the forces of three nations and split open two worlds to get here. Faerie magic and blazing hatred could only stretch so far.

Hero didn't turn; she didn't have to. The vines rushed at us, encircled us, raised us from the floor. I didn't fight this time—only tensed, breathed deep, and braced myself for that horrible dampening of magic the way I might for an insect or clammy frog I needed to pick up. It didn't prepare me enough. These vines were stronger than the ones in Paris, and they were barbed; I felt the thorns dig into my arms, my stomach, the soft point of my throat, sharp enough to cut. The magic in my blood sparked, flickered, then died. A wave of nausea took me; I bit back the cry pushing to get out.

It's for Hero , I told myself. She stepped into a faerie circle to save you. You can step into this.

"Hero." I kept my voice as calm as I could. Blood trickled from my wrist, and a single drop hit the ground. "We came to talk to you."

"I told you to leave her alone," the faerie in Hero's body said. Her voice was absent, distracted. All her attention was on the great oak, her palm pressed to the rough bark of its trunk, her eyes tracing the lines of its branches. I could see no glint of silver on her finger. Perhaps, after all, Grimoire had prevented her from taking the ring with his life. "There's almost none of her left anyway."

"I don't believe that," I said, and tried to mean it. The faerie seemed so much less Hero than she had in Paris.

"Why not, Clover Hill? Does the scholarship say otherwise?"

The scholarship was divided, in fact. I didn't say so. "Because you still haven't killed us."

The vines flexed, and the thorns bit my flesh; I winced, but the grip soon relaxed. Hero dropped her hand from the great oak tree, and her face was somewhere between fury and anguish.

"I can't get her out," she said, almost too low to be heard. "I've come all this way, and I can't save her."

Eddie spoke up for the first time. "Who?" He sounded for all the world as though he was only mildly curious. It was the way I'd heard him talk to his pet field mice, to his plants, to Iris and Little John when they were children and he had visited the house. It was the way he asked questions of the world: not challenging, like Alden, or probing, like me, but soft enough to leave no mark. "What did you come here to find?"

Hero laughed, and her laugh was an open wound. "Oh, you want to know that, do you, Edmund Gaskell? You want to see what's at the root of all your precious flowers, and why their magic works?"

"Yes," Eddie said simply. "I do, please."

Hero turned to us at last, slowly, and seemed to grow taller. It took a heartbeat to realise that she had risen in the air, very slightly, so that her bare feet only lightly brushed the ground. It looked strange without wings, grotesque, like a marionette being made to walk. Then she clapped her hands together and spoke a lilting faerie spell.

There was a crack, so loud it seemed the world itself had snapped in two. The paved floor split across the middle, shattered like a mirror, and dropped away in a cloud of dust and grit. Had we been standing on it, we would have fallen with it; as it was, the vines holding us flexed and snapped, and I cried out on reflex.

At the same time, the room kindled into moonlight. It was the light that had glowed at Ashfield, all those years ago, the luminescence I'd seen lurking in hallways and under doors, only this was a thousand times brighter. It seared my eyes and made them sting; I blinked rapidly, and tears spilled down my cheeks and fogged my glasses. The library hall became a chamber of white light and black shadows, the great tree a dark shape blurred against my vision. And then I saw it.

Beneath the floor, covered in stone and rubble, were the archives. They were perhaps ten feet below, a twisted web of shelves that spidered out into the rest of the library, the beginning of perhaps miles of forbidden knowledge. Plunging through the centre was the rest of the great oak, the base that nobody ever saw. It grew up through the earth floor, roots twisted among the shelves.

Inside it was a faerie.

It was visible now as the light blazed: a silhouette, small and inhumanly slender, curled at the heart of the trunk. I had been to the Natural History Museum in London and seen the shelves of insects suspended in amber; this looked much the same, its fibrous wings and frozen limbs buried deep in the transparent glow. Then I narrowed my eyes, and I saw the delicate ribs breathing in and out. It was alive.

Certainly there are secrets buried in the archives that would help us come to some theories about what went wrong. It took me a while to place the memory. The lecture about Amiens, so many years ago; the words that had sent Alden and Hero searching for the archives and cost James Larkin his place at the university. He had known, or suspected. He was trying to tell us what lay buried there. Not books, as we had assumed. This.

A living faerie, trapped within the great oak at the heart of the library.

"Who is it?" Eddie asked.

"My sister." Hero's voice was tight with a rage that I was finally beginning to understand.

I fumbled for my own voice and found it. "How—how long has she been here?"

"How long do you think? Hundreds of years. Since the Families carved this abomination from our country, with her at its core." She sank slowly to the rubble, so that she stood beside the frozen figure, and tilted her chin to look at us. "Did you even know that some of the fae are born from trees?"

The scholarship ran through my head—Dorothy Edgeware had produced the definitive categorisation of the fae in the 1870s, there had been a revised edition around 1913, many of the entries have been disputed in papers elsewhere. Eddie spoke first.

"Yes," he said. "Dryads. You're the dryad of a silver birch, aren't you?"

She inclined her head, a stiff jerk. "My tree is on the other side of the gate. But hundreds of years ago there was no gate. Only a tangle of woodland, ancient and green and wild. The doors opened from your world on the edge, and sometimes the other fae would venture through to play or to bargain or to trick. We never did. Our homes were in our trees. My tree was the silver birch. Hers was the oak. We wanted nothing to do with your kind. And then one day another door opened in the sky, and this one didn't wait at the edge of the trees. It rushed forward in its hunger and it took a great bite from our world. It swallowed elms and oaks and ivy, sky and earth and grass. The whole forest screamed."

It's a brutal act, you know , Sam had said, to widen the gap between doors. It ate up great swathes of faerie country. They said the fae never quite forgave it. Our dealings with them were different after that.

I swallowed hard.

"When it was over, I was left on the edge," the dryad that was Hero said. "There was a terrible gate of dead wood before me, and my sister, the dryad of the great oak, was on the other side. For hundreds of years I believed she was dead, and I grieved."

"And then you found out she was still here," he said. "How?"

"Chance," she said bitterly. "Or fate. Another door opened. This time, I went through."

"Why? Your kind aren't interested in our world. You said as much."

"I did," she agreed. "This one interested me for one reason. It was a child on the other side."

My heart caught. Alden. That had been Alden, at the start of the war.

"I'd not seen a human child before," she said. "He was so small, so open, so hungry. He told me a good deal about his brother, and about the war. What he didn't tell me, I read in his heart. It was too young to guard itself from me. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that from the moment I stepped through I knew that my sister was still alive."

"What?" Surprise startled me into speech once more. "How?"

Alden at twelve could no more have known about what lay at the heart of Camford than anyone outside the very highest echelons of magical government. Even had his father known, the binding spell would have kept it from being passed on.

"His blood," the faerie said. "His blood, and yours, and the blood of every Family member in the country. This tree—the great oak—it scatters pollen to the winds all year. You all breathe it in, every one of you human mages. I could taste it spilling through your veins. That tree still stood whole and growing in the centre of this terrible place. Which meant that my sister was still trapped there—stunted, sleeping, bound inside, but alive. After that, I wanted nothing more than to get out to your world and set her free."

"You broke free at Amiens," I said quietly.

"Briefly. I had stepped into a circle once, now—I knew its magic. Faeries had been trying to break those binding runes for years, but they hadn't been built for dryads. We have different knowledge of magic, and unlike most of the fae, we don't easily lose interest. For the next few years I did nothing except work at ways out of that spell, over and over again, until it started to buckle, and at last it broke."

Trees were patient, Eddie had said. It might take centuries, but sooner or later they tore down walls.

"I didn't want to come out on a battlefield," Hero added, as an afterthought. "The safest thing would have been if Alden Lennox-Fontaine had summoned me again. I tried to tell him that. Instead, a soldier summoned me in the midst of his defeat. I stole him and tried to run. But there were too many mages there, on both sides. I burned through hundreds of men, and still in the end they forced me back."

Her eyes shifted, as if looking at a memory. "It was difficult after that. The Board guessed what I was coming for—there are few reasons why a dryad would act as I had acted—and they knew I could break free of the runes. They locked the doors and sealed them. All I had was the half-open door at Ashfield, and Alden Lennox-Fontaine on the other side. It was enough. A door, and someone to open it. I wouldn't leave him alone after that. Every minute he was in the house, I pressed him and pressed him until I thought I would break him. At last the door opened, and I had a body once again. This body."

"It should have been me," I said.

The faerie didn't respond to that. I'm not sure what I expected her to say. It wasn't as though she cared.

"I've used this body for eight years to get here," she said. "I learned where the three locks were. I broke them. I crossed two worlds to find her and bring her home. Now I can't."

"Why not?" Eddie asked reasonably. "She's right there."

Hero's teeth bared in what was almost a hiss. "I know she's right there! I'm here with her. But I'm here in this body. And this body cannot become the ward of the Camford Library."

It took me longer than it should have, even suspended by thorns above the library floor. Then I remembered the doors torn apart in the passage, the way the walls had been split open by the roses to clear the way to the centre of the library. Grimoire's body dead in the quad, and the ring stolen from his finger.

"The ward can release the oak dryad from her tree, can't they?" I said slowly. "That's why the ward was banned from access to the archives. They wanted to make sure he never had the opportunity."

"I killed him and took the ring from his finger," Hero said. "That should have been enough to make me ward in his place. Only Camford worked another clause into the spell."

"To protect it from falling into the hands of the fae?"

"No. To protect it from falling into the hands of students. The new ward needs to be a Camford graduate."

It was so bitterly ironic I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. This, of all things, was what had ruined the plans she had spent years setting in motion. The faerie hadn't let Hero come back to Camford. The magic in Camford would have noticed her presence too easily—besides, she had other plans for her. Hero had wanted more than anything to graduate, and the faerie had kept her from it. And because of that, she had come all this way, in a stolen body, only to find that body had betrayed her.

It meant something else too. Something that, for the first time since seeing the faerie in the tree, gave me a whisper of hope.

"I can do it," I said, and felt rather than heard Eddie draw breath beside me. "I could release your sister. I'm a Camford scholar. I graduated. I could become the new ward."

The words sounded ridiculous, impossible; unexpectedly, in the face of all the terrible circumstances, they brought a heady thrill with them. Me, the scholarship witch, the ward of Camford Library. Even my wildest seventeen-year-old ambitions would never have dared venture there. But I could do it. I was the only one present who could. I had always wanted to belong to Camford, more than anything in the world. Now I could be a part of it, powerful and undeniable. Nobody would ever be able to say again I had no place here.

The faerie snorted, in a startlingly Hero-like manner. "Why would you help me? As you said, you're a Camford scholar. This is your university."

"That doesn't mean I want your sister trapped! Surely no scholar would."

"And yet everyone who reaches the upper echelons of the Board or the Camford Faculty does. Every year, over and over for hundreds of years, they learn what lies at the heart of Camford. None of them ever try to let her go."

That pulled me back down to earth. It was exactly what worried me, it was true. Because why hadn't they, all those centuries of scholars and politicians who had risen to power and learned what was at the heart of the university? If the faerie had only been trapped by accident when Camford was formed, they would have done so. Never mind the cruelty—it was dangerous to have her here, sleeping below the earth while scholars and students milled overhead. Surely there had to be a reason why it was necessary, or somebody would have stopped it long ago.

It was the same question Eddie and I had asked on the train, the question with no answer. Camford could be built anywhere. Why had they built it on faerie ground?

Eddie had thought the same thing. "Be careful," he said, in a voice almost too low to hear. "I'm not saying don't do it. Just be careful."

"If I did agree," I hedged, in answer to the faerie, "what would happen to Camford? Would it survive?"

"I couldn't say," Hero said. "Why? Do you think a university is worth more than my sister's freedom?"

I had read enough folklore to know that I couldn't say was one of those ambiguous wordings the fae loved—that there was a very good chance that Camford might in fact not survive the oak dryad's release. I also knew that her question was a fair one.

"No," I said. "No, of course it isn't." I paused. "What would you give us, then, for your sister's freedom? Would you promise to release Hero in exchange?"

The faerie's laugh sounded higher and tighter, less like Hero's than before. "Why would I want this body if I had my sister back? I would take her and leave it behind. We would take a cutting from the oak so her tree could grow anew and flee back to our own country, too deep to ever be found or summoned. You could lock the doors behind us and never speak to us again. This is what I came here for." She paused, and something in her face changed. "Very well."

She threw something toward me, and the vines around my wrists loosened just enough for me to snatch it from the air. It was Grimoire's ring, a tiny smear of his blood marring the Family crest. It burned hotter than it should have, as though it had passed through fire. Even through the plants dampening the magic in my blood, I felt the surge of waiting power.

"Set that on," the faerie said, "and you can be ward of the library. If you truly mean what you say, Clover Hill, then I will make that deal. I will give you Hero in exchange for my sister."

This was it. I had come to make exactly that deal—Hero, in exchange for what the faerie may want—and here it was. Hero's life, a wrong set right, and a power I had never dreamed of attaining, all with one deal. I had said, hadn't I, that I would save Hero whatever the cost?

But I had been thinking of the cost to me, and I had expected a cost I could calculate. I was still missing too much about this. I didn't know what ripping the faerie from the heart of Camford would do. At the very least, it could bring Camford tumbling down around us, and I wasn't certain I was ready for that. It didn't matter how much I told myself that Camford was only a place. It was a place I had loved for my entire adult life.

And it might do still worse. That was the real difficulty, what truly haunted me. I hated making decisions without all the information. I needed months to research this, investigate the possible outcomes, find out exactly what spell had been woven in the founding of Camford and why it needed such a terrible sacrifice. I couldn't just throw everything away to save one person, even a person I loved.

Yet wasn't that what I had done in coming to Camford in the first place?

I had hesitated too long. Hero's face hardened, sharpened, the faerie light flickering once more in her eyes. "I didn't think so," she said, and turned.

I raised my voice, cursing myself inwardly. I was losing her. "No, wait—"

I had no chance to go further. Behind her, the doors burst open.

It was Alden.