27

27

I t was Alden, but at first I didn't recognise him. I had seen him only a week ago, crisp and polished and slicked-down, more fa?ade than person. That fa?ade had cracked now. His clothes were frayed and torn by a thousand branches; his face was scratched and bleeding. His gold hair hung in filthy curls, and his eyes blazed fever bright. Magic throbbed in the air around him, in every taut line of his body.

He had been at Ashfield when I had phoned him this morning, hours before the last lock had broken. It had felt so inevitable, so right, that he should be in the place I always saw him in my mind, that I hadn't thought to wonder why. If I had, I would still not have believed he was planning something so blatantly suicidal. No human expedition had ever made it through faerie country and returned.

Yet that was what he had done. All these years, the Ashfield door had been closed, and the locks held it in place. When Hero had started to break the locks apart, he would have seen the opportunity at once. He had waited at Ashfield, beside the old door, until the London lock had been shattered and the Ashfield door could be opened once more. This time, he hadn't waited for a faerie to come out. He set out across faerie country the same way Hero had come, God knows how far through wind and thorn and wasteland, and found the Camford gate.

It was Alden, and he had at last come for revenge.

The vines rushed to meet him at once, as they had us. He was ready for them. They struck him and burst into flame, recoiling in a shower of fiery roses. ( The books! my heart screamed, moved by the patterns of a lifetime, but the fire burned out without spreading.) In the same movement, he spoke a word, and a chain of silver shot from his outstretched hand. It whipped through the air, lithe and sleek as an eel, and snapped like a whip around Hero. She crumpled, chain wrapping her from neck to ankles, with a terrible hiss as if she had been burned too.

Alden strode forward through the charred vines and slid down the rubble to the faerie, his movements too controlled, his eyes too dark in his chalk-white face. The cord of silver shrank as he drew nearer, withdrawing into itself or into him. He was perhaps ten feet from her when he clenched his fist. At once, the chain pulled taut, cutting into Hero's flesh. She screamed, an unearthly wail of horror that tapered into a terrible gasp.

"Stop it!" I fought against the vines, furious at my own helplessness, but they only tightened their hold. "What are you doing?"

"Agrippa," Alden said, and his voice was ice. "That was always the problem with his theories, do you remember? To bind a faerie with them, you would have to be standing on faerie ground."

The terrible thing was, there was a small instinctive flicker of me that actually found that interesting.

"Alden," I said, and my own voice was so calm it teetered on the brink of hysteria. "Please. Think about this."

His laugh was little more than a choke. " Think about this? I have been thinking about nothing else since I was twelve. Why do you think I left Camford, why I went to so much effort to rise so high and so fast on the Board? Did you think I'd lost interest?"

"No," I said. "I thought you'd given up."

I should have known better. The only thing he had given up on was Camford. There was nothing more to be learned there, as I had proved—not without getting into the archives, and Grimoire had never stopped watching Alden after the first time he had taken his ring. But the restrictions on the study of the fae wouldn't hold back the minister for magical enforcement. In that position, he could have learned everything he needed.

His fist clenched again, and the faerie on the ground let out another cry as she convulsed.

"Stop it." I tried to keep my voice quiet this time. "Alden, please. You're hurting her. Is that really the kind of research you've been doing?"

"It only hurts because it's in a human body," he said. "Human beings hurt. That was its choice. I don't see why it shouldn't suffer for it."

"Hero suffers too." Eddie, who had been talking freely to the faerie in Hero's body, clearly had to fight to get those words out. He really was scared of Alden. I wondered if he had always been—if I hadn't noticed, or if he hadn't. "If you hurt the faerie, you hurt her."

"Hero's gone. That thing devoured her a long time ago." Nevertheless he unclenched his fist, reluctantly, and Hero's body on the ground relaxed. Her face was grey, her eyes half-closed, and her breath came in shallow gasps.

"She isn't gone," I said. "Hero. The faerie just agreed to release her if I made a deal."

"I didn't come to deal." His voice was still tight, but at least it was calmer. "I told you. I came to kill this monster, and I came to take back my brother."

"And what makes you think your brother's alive if Hero isn't?"

"Thomas wasn't possessed. He was taken. I saw him. This thing showed him to me every night I spent in Ashfield growing up: Thomas, in the faerie court, growing paler and thinner every year but no older. You locked him behind the Ashfield door, and however much I learned, I couldn't get him out. I'm here now. I'm not leaving without him."

I knew it was useless to point out that the faerie could have shown him anything in nightmares, that there was no more reason to believe that Hero was dead than that his brother was alive. I had worked with Alden long and intensely enough to know his weaknesses as a scholar, and his greatest had always been in finding evidence to support what he wanted to be true.

"Then perhaps we can bargain for Thomas too." I put every ounce of reason I could into my voice, willing his own to come out of hiding to meet it. "She doesn't want him any more than she wants Hero. She promised to give Hero back if I set free her sister in the heart of the tree. Let me do that. Or you could do it, if you wanted. You graduated from Camford just as I did. You could be ward instead."

"That's impossible." He looked at me for the first time, and I saw a little of him come back to himself. "It tried to kill your brother too, remember. It killed hundreds of people that day. It's just come from killing still more in London. It seduced and murdered Lord Beresford—though God knows he's no loss. Why would you even want to deal with it?"

"We stole faerie land and imprisoned a dryad inside her own tree," I countered. "Her own sister. That's why she hates us. That's why she doesn't care who she hurts or kills getting here. You must have known that, for you to come here as soon as the gates opened."

"When I was told about Camford last year, the day I made minister, some of the things it had said to me began to make more sense. It makes no difference."

"No difference ?" My hands were bound; I nodded toward the door, trying in a sweep to take in the scale of the library, the lecture theatres and halls of residence, the crooked streets outside, all shot through with thorns and forest. I'd always loved that rustling overgrowth, but without thinking about it, I'd always considered it an invasion, weeds trying to colonise buildings that had stood for centuries. We were the invaders. All this time, it had been trying to break free. "We did this! This is what Camford has been, all this time."

" We didn't do anything," Alden snapped. "It was done centuries ago. And I'm sorry about it, I truly am, but I didn't do it, and it's too late to do anything to change it now. This has been the foundation of our world for hundreds of years, and perhaps it is rotten, but what's been built up around it is sound. We can't just rip it out. Not without destroying Camford and everything that comes with it."

So I had been right—freeing the faerie did mean the destruction of everything around it. I tried not to think about the library cracking apart, the buildings falling. "Even if that's true—does it really matter? Surely Camford can be rebuilt. It's only a school of magic. People can learn magic anywhere."

"It isn't just that."

"What else is it?"

I watched his face tighten, and recognised the tell-tale sign of a binding curse—presumably the one he had mentioned on the telephone only that morning, the one taken by ministers to ensure their silence. His eyes flickered as he sought a way around.

"It's a place where the Families come to learn magic," he said at last. "It has been since before there were Families at all." He looked at me seriously, willing me to understand.

And I did. Far too late, but at last I did.

This tree scatters pollen to the winds all year , the faerie had said. You all breathe it in. I could taste it spilling through your veins.

"The plants." Around me, as if in answer, the leaves quivered. "The plants sense and enhance magic. Eddie worked that out, a long time ago. When we come to Camford, we breathe them in, through the spores and the pollen, every year. This is why the Families can do magic so much easier than everyone else. It's in their blood in the most literal sense."

"Exactly." Alden gave a small, relieved shiver: the binding curse letting him go. "We've built our world on the premise that the Families are born to magic—have a natural, true-born ability to wield it—and that's why we have a right to keep it to ourselves. But it isn't natural. It comes from this, and places like it all over the world. It always has. That faerie, bound to the tree, is what keeps these plants alive. We take in their magic, and it helps us in whatever spell we care to cast—but only as long as the plants are here and thriving. Without them, our blood ceases to be anything special at all."

This was it, then. This was why everyone who had climbed high enough to reach the truth about Camford had been forced to accept it: because without it, they were nothing. There were no common people and mages, no magical families with magic running in their veins and ordinary families who didn't matter. There was no reason for magic to be secret to only a few. There was only a sprawling university whose doors were guarded, and a faerie at the heart of it whose imprisonment kept those who were let in special.

"We weren't the only country to do this, you know," Alden said. "Not even the first—the Romans did it, thousands of years ago, and the Mongols and the Greeks did something similar. The French did it, and the Germans, and the Japanese. If we hadn't, we'd have fallen behind."

I didn't want to hear the justifications. I was still trying to grasp the implications. "But not every Family member in Britain comes to Camford. Women don't, usually."

"Not everyone has to. Once you've spent time here doing magic, it winds itself around every cell in your blood and bone and body, and any child of yours will inherit it too. In that sense it is an inheritance. Just a legacy that comes at the expense of another."

Any child. The image came, with overwhelming poignancy: a small blond head curved over my hands, watching them as I brought her wooden farm set to brief, joyous life. A face, blue eyes narrowed in concentration, as her small hands tried to work the same charm.

"Rose," I whispered.

Alden frowned. "Who?"

"My daughter." I couldn't remember if I'd ever spoken those words aloud. "Rose Hill. Matthew and Jemima are raising her—I told you she was theirs—but she's mine. She was born in April 1922, nine months after the door was opened. After we spent the night together."

I think it was the only time I'd ever seen him truly shocked. "Dear God," he said softly. All at once, I could recognise him again. The silver cord went slack in his hand. "I had no idea. Why didn't you say something?"

"What would you have done? Married me? I knew you better than that, at least. We weren't even on speaking terms." Another time, those words would have been accusatory; now I didn't even care. "She's very good at magic. It comes naturally to her, the way it does to the Families. I thought… I thought that was from you. I thought it was in your blood. But it's mine as well. I gave it to her."

"I don't know what I would have done," Alden said, as if I'd said no more than the first sentence. "I wish you'd told me, all the same. Whatever you wanted to do, I would have helped."

"My family helped. We didn't need you."

Eddie had said nothing more, all this time. I don't think Alden noticed—he had, after all, always had a bad habit of overlooking Eddie. But I looked sideways at him on instinct, wondering how he had reacted to hearing about Rose, and had to work not to react myself. His face was locked in concentration, his lips moving very slightly as they formed a spell too quiet to be heard; one hand, bound to his side by the vines, was moving too. I remembered the ivy on the path, the way it had listened to him. Not while the faerie was there, he had said—the plants' loyalty was to her above all. Now she lay on the ground, powerless, unmoving, perhaps even unconscious. Hope fluttered in my chest, unexpected. If he could get us free…

I forced myself to look away. It wouldn't matter what Eddie could do if Alden saw him first. I needed to draw his attention.

"Please," I said, and Alden focused on me as if with great effort. "You have the faerie bound now. Let's work something out, all of us. You said, at your apartment, you didn't want Hero dead."

"Of course I don't." His voice hardened again, but not all the way. Some small part of him was still thinking of Rose—was thinking, perhaps, of the night I had found the faerie gate, when we had been invincible, and our brilliance and our excitement had shone out and bound us together. Sex never meant very much to Alden, Hero had told me, and I believed her. But I meant something. We all did. "Not if there's another way. There isn't."

"There is. We can do as she asks."

His eyebrows shot up, as they would have in Camford had I been proposing a theory at once impractical and impressively radical. "Truly? I've just told you what that would mean. Do you really expect me to believe you would let Camford die and see every Family member lose the magic in their blood, on the off-chance a faerie will let Hero go?"

"Not just for Hero," I said. "Because it's the right thing to do."

I hadn't put it into such clear words in my head before—I had been too tangled up with ambitions and consequences and magic. Once I had, I knew it was true.

"The right thing for whom? For the fae? Believe me, they have no such qualms about whatever they can do to us."

"And who's ‘us,' Alden?" I returned. "Because I'm not one of the Families. I'm one of the ones they tried to keep from ever knowing magic existed. I only have it in my blood because I forced my way in here, and I was made to feel every step of the way as though it didn't belong to me."

"But it's in your blood now. Have you considered what it would feel like to lose that, after all these years? The pollen dies if it loses touch with the tree. Those weeds binding you are dampening it now, and I'm sure you hate it. That's how it will feel for the rest of your life, if you destroy Camford. Thousands of people across the country will feel the glow in their veins go dark—our daughter included."

"You forget," I said, as evenly as if everything in my soul didn't curl up and cry at the thought, "that's how I lived my whole life before Camford. I taught myself magic then, with time and study and effort. It was harder—much harder—but it worked. There's no reason we can't all do the same."

"Without Camford? Without this place to teach them? Tell me honestly, Clover, can you live in a world where all this is swept away: the halls, the spires, the lecture theatres, the labyrinth of a library that goes on forever?"

"New universities are built all the time, out there in the real world. People can learn anywhere. There are books of magic in houses across the country, and thousands of people to teach them. I'd rather live in that world if this is the cost of the one we have."

"And what about you?" Alden turned to Eddie. I stiffened, but he seemed to notice nothing amiss. "Do you agree with Clover? Is that the world you'd prefer to live in?"

"I don't think it matters what world we prefer," Eddie said. He was looking at Alden, but I knew the answer was for me. "I agree with Clover that it's the right thing to do."

Alden laughed suddenly, a laugh at once bitter and desperately tired, as though giving up on an after-dinner argument that had stretched well past when both parties should have gone to bed. "Have it your way, then. Do what you want to Camford. Destroy the Families. I don't care, truly. You won't let this monster go." His hand flexed, and the faerie's back arched as the silver tightened. "I've come too far for that. I won't deal with it because there's no deal that will see it dead."

I'd known that, really. He'd hated it too much for too long, through too many long nights of torment from too young an age. It was why, deep down, he'd accepted Hero's death as the only way. The only way to kill the faerie was to kill her too.

I tried again nonetheless. "Alden—"

Alden didn't move. Eddie did.

The vines holding us both up slackened and bowed. The prickle of thorns about my wrists and ankles loosened; for one stomach-dropping second I was falling, then it had caught me again and was lowering me gently to the floor. Eddie was already free. He stepped toward Alden, rose stems and bracken still pulling away from his clothes, and raised his hands. The vines shot from the ground and reared up around Alden.

Alden reacted as before, almost as quickly. Flame shot up in a sheet in front of him; the twigs burned at once, and the thicker branches burst into fire. Yet he was caught off guard—besides, this wasn't a faerie he hated but his childhood friend. The flames were wilder, weaker, less focused. They caught the edges of the great wave of undergrowth surging toward him; it still kept coming. They spread outward across the floor in a great crackling blanket, igniting the roots and trees in their wake. And still, at Eddie's fingertips, the forest kept coming.

"Oh, don't you dare , Edmund Gaskell!" Alden hissed, over the spit and fury of the flames. His eyes were blazing blue. "I've come too far to be stopped by you."

"You never did think much of me, did you?" Eddie said. His voice was calm, but I saw in his eyes the same coiled warning that I had glimpsed the morning after we had released the faerie eight years ago. "I knew that, even in school. I put up with it, because you were kind to me, and I thought an awful lot of you. Then you stopped being kind to me, and I put up with that too. I told myself I liked you, because I didn't want to admit I was afraid of you. But I am not letting you threaten the people I love. Not anymore."

The fire had reached the walls now. On the lower shelves, books began to smoke and burn. The air was searingly hot, and I coughed as the acrid smoke caught in my throat. I barely noticed any of it, not even the books. The vines that had been holding me pulled away. One of the thorns nicked my arm as it did so; blood welled and blossomed along the cut, and I didn't feel that either.

The ring was in my hand. Grimoire's ring, the ring of the ward of the Camford Library, and his body lay outside.

It was one of the most important moments of my life, and I didn't think. I didn't even hesitate. I just slipped it on my finger.

Until then, the most powerful magic I had ever felt was the faerie spell that had broken Matthew's curse. That had only ripped through my body. This took it to pieces and left me outside. In one shock of light or thunder I felt every nerve, every muscle, every blood vessel, each one sharp-etched and bright as the after-images that come with a flash of lightning. Then it was gone, faded, and I had gone beyond it into something else.

I was the library. I was the yellow-paged books nestling like sleeping doves on the shelves; the old familiar curves of the stairways, steps worn from hundreds of years of footsteps and railings polished by the brush of thousands of hands. I was the quiet stack rooms steeped in cobwebs, the bright study rooms filled with the memory of students' voices. I was the rooftop that looked over the wall, the circular windows that looked out to the quad, the greenery that threaded through them all. I was the great oak at the heart of the building, bathed in slanted sunlight from the domed roof. Somewhere in the midst of all this were Eddie and Alden and the faerie in Hero's body, but they were so small and fleeting, I barely felt them. I was the ward of Camford Library. I was everything I had ever wanted to be.

Then I was back, doubled over, fighting for breath. Magic crackled under my skin and fizzed in my blood; there was a low buzzing in my ears; I was acutely aware of where I was and everything within it, but I was myself again.

Alden was still locked in his struggle with Eddie. He hadn't seen me. The great oak tree was there, three or four paces away. All I had to do was run to it, lay my hand on the bark, and unlock it as I would any door in Camford. Eddie wanted me to: He had told me so, right before he had broken free. He was putting himself in the line of danger not only to save me, but to give me a chance to do what only I could do.

Yet could I really do it? I had meant every word I had said to Alden. The thought of that terrible door opening and swallowing up faerie country, the image of the faerie kidnapped and bound while her sister grieved outside those gates, the knowledge that we had all been living and working on the bones of her tree and siphoning her magic—it all sickened me. And that was to say nothing of the world that had grown up in its wake. The Families cutting themselves off from the rest of the human race, steeped in tradition and lies, claiming magic as their birthright while keeping it from everybody else at any cost. I thought of the first time I had seen Oxford—the deep twinge of unease I had felt without knowing why, the relief that Camford on the surface was nothing like it. Yet it was. The only difference was that the door had let me in, and so I hadn't questioned who else it was keeping out and why. Matthew and Sam had understood long before I did how unfair it all was, and it had nearly torn them apart forever.

Unfair or not, though, it was the world we lived in. Its roots ran deep, and tearing them up would mean tearing everything else up with it. Did I have the right to inflict that kind of trauma on a world that had already had its foundations shaken to the core? Surely there was still a better way, an easier way, a way to fix everything without breaking it first?

I waited a fraction too long. Alden at last caught a gap between the plants; he took it, and a blast of light hit Eddie head-on. He fell to the ground with a startled cry, and Alden looked up and saw me.

He could have killed me. My blood was coursing with new magic, but it was a confused tangle I had no time to separate. I was off guard, defenceless, and he was ready. Whatever he hit me with, there was no way I would have had time to recognise the spell, think of a counter-spell, and block it. He could have burned me alive or frozen me in ice or turned me to stone.

Nothing came in my direction. I can only think, and believe, that it was for the same reason that he hadn't killed Eddie either—the same reason why, despite all he had said, the faerie in Hero's body still lived. When it came to it, when he looked at us, even through all his anger, he saw us. He had been lying about many things, that day in London at his too-new apartment, but one thing had been true. After his brother had been stolen away, the three of us were the only people he had ever loved. I had told Eddie that he wasn't going to let it stop him. But perhaps we don't always get to choose what stops us, what catches us off guard in the middle of a dark road and puts us on another path entirely.

In that hesitation, I ran. The ground beneath me was uneven with roots and slippery with rubble; I fell to my knees once, picked myself up, lunged for the tree. It was still glowing through the falling ash, suffused with moonlight with no moon to be seen. This close, the faerie was etched in precise detail: I could see the brush of her eyelashes against her cheek, the spindly bones and the fine long hair. My hand fell on the bark right above the curve of her elbow.

I looked back over my shoulder, at Eddie and Alden and Hero in the ruins of the Camford Library. Eddie was climbing to his feet, streaked with dust and ash, his pale face watchful and intent. Alden stood very still. His eyes were locked on mine. In the mingled silver and firelight, I saw, irrelevantly, that they had the same flecks of gold as our daughter's.

"Don't," he said simply.

I couldn't. I loved Camford, its lecture halls and its crooked streets and my little rooms in Chancery Hall when the rain lashed the windows. I loved the magic that was coursing through my blood now as strongly as I had ever felt it, the magic I now knew was every bit as strong in me as it was in any of the Families. I loved the library—my library, the library that had just bound itself to me. I had fought so hard to be here, to be exactly what I had become. A witch, a scholar, the ward of Camford Library. This was my home. I loved every stone and every tower and every blade of grass.

I knew what I should do. I knew it was right. Even then, though, with the great oak pulsing under my fingers, I didn't have the strength to do it.

Except that I looked at the faerie bound in silver at Alden's feet, and saw with a start that her eyes were open. They caught mine, as Alden's had only a moment ago. And this time, they weren't the faerie's eyes alone. Hero looked back at me from deep inside her own body, for the first time in eight years. With great effort, she nodded.

The first time I had met Alden Lennox-Fontaine had been in this very library, nearly a decade ago. I had thought then that if I could find a way to make faerie magic safe, fix it in some way, I could fix everything. Matthew, my family, the world that had seemed splintered into a thousand pieces. I know Alden had in his own way been trying to do the same thing. It was what had bound the two of us together, for better and for worse. Eddie had wanted to hide from the world. Hero had wanted to make it new. Alden and I, in our own ways, loved the old, safe world—Ashfield and Camford, tradition and beauty, the sunlit days of our childhoods before the Great War.

But the world had never been safe, not for everybody. It had been broken for a very long time, and the war had only shown those cracks for what they were. It couldn't be patched over. It needed to shatter if it was ever to be rebuilt into something glittering and new.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Then I turned back to the trunk of the great oak at the heart of Camford, and I broke it wide open.