She cringes but subsides into silence. I wipe her eyes with the back of my hand. “Okay?” I ask her.
When she doesn’t answer, I figure there’s no more point in conversation. I steer her toward the kitchens. We’ll have to pass by guards; there’s no other way out. She has pasted on a horrible rictus of a smile, but at least she has enough self-possession for that. More worrying is the way she can’t stop staring at things. As we walk toward the guards, the intensity of her gaze is impossible to disguise.
I improvise, trying to sound as though I am reciting a memorized message, without inflection in the words. “Prince Cardan says we are to attend him.”
One of the guards turns to the other. “Balekin won’t like that.”
I try not to react, but it’s hard. I just stand there and wait. If they lunge at us, I am going to have to kill them.
“Very well,” the first guard says. “Go. But inform Cardan that his brother demands he bring both of you back this time.”
I don’t like the sound of that.
The second guard glances over at Sophie and her wild eyes. “What do you see?”
I can feel her trembling beside me, her whole body shaking. I need to say something fast, before she does. “Lord Cardan told us to be more observant,” I say, hoping that the plausible confusion of an ambiguous command will help to explain the way she’s acting.
Then I walk on with Sophie through the kitchens, past the human servants I am not saving, aware of the futility of my actions. Does helping one person really matter, on balance?
Once I have power, I will find a way to help them all, I tell myself. And once Dain is in power, I will have power.
I make sure to keep my movements slow. I let myself breathe only when we’ve finally stepped outside.
And it turns out, even that’s too soon. Cardan is riding toward us on a tall, dappled gray horse. Behind him is a girl on a palfrey—Nicasia. As soon as he gets inside, the guards will ask him about us. As soon as he gets inside, he will know something is wrong.
If he doesn’t see me and know sooner than that.
What would be the punishment for stealing a prince’s servant? I don’t know. A curse perhaps, such as being turned into a raven and forced to fly north and live for seven times seven years in an ice palace—or worse, no curse at all. An execution.
It takes everything I’ve got not to break and run. It’s not as though I think I could make it to the woods, especially not hauling a girl with me. He would ride us both down. “Stop staring,” I hiss at Sophie, harsher than I mean to. “Look at your feet.”
“Stop scolding me,” she says, but at least she’s not crying. I keep my head down and, looping her arm through mine, walk toward the woods.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cardan swing down from his saddle, black hair blown by the wind. He looks in my direction and pauses for a moment. I suck in my breath and don’t run.
I can’t run.
There is no thundering of hoofbeats, no racing to catch and punish us. To my immense relief, he seems to see only two servants heading toward the forest, perhaps to gather wood or berries or something.
The closer we get to the edge of the woods, the more each step feels fraught.
Then Sophie sinks to her knees, turning to look back at Balekin’s manor. A keening sound comes from deep in her throat. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “No no no no no. No. This isn’t real. This didn’t happen.”
I jerk her up, digging my fingers into her armpit. “Move,” I say. “Move or I will leave you here. Do you understand me? I will leave you, and Prince Cardan will find you and drag you back inside.”
Cheating a glance back, I see him. He’s off his horse and leading it to the stables. Nicasia still sits atop hers, her head tipped back, laughing at something he said. He’s smiling, too, but it’s not his usual sneer. He doesn’t look like the wicked villain from a story. He looks like an inhuman boy out for a walk with his friend in the moonlight.
Sophie staggers onward. We can’t get caught now, not when we’re so close.
The moment when I cross into the pine-needle-strewn woods, I let out an enormous breath. I keep her moving until we reach the stream. I make her walk through it, though the cold water and sucking mud slows us down. Any way of hiding our tracks is worth doing.
Eventually, she sinks down on the bank and gives over to weeping. I watch her, wishing I knew what to do. Wishing I was a better, more sympathetic person, instead of being annoyed and worried that any delay is going to get us caught. I make myself sit on the remains of a termite-eaten log on the bank of the stream and let her cry, but when minutes have passed and her tears haven’t stopped, I go over and kneel in the muddy grass.
“It’s not far to my house,” I say, trying to sound persuasive. “Just a little more walking.”
“Shut up!” she shouts, lifting her hand to ward me off.
Frustration flares. I want to scream at her. I want to shake her. I bite my tongue and fist my hands to make myself stop.
“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “This is happening fast, I know. But I really do want to help you. I can get you out of Faerie. Tonight.”
The girl is shaking her head again. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. I was at Burning Man, and there was this guy who said he had this gig passing hors d’oeuvres for a rich weirdo in one of the air-conditioned tents. Just don’t take anything, he told me. If you do, you’ll have to serve me for a thousand years… .”
Her voice trails off, but now I see how she was trapped. It must have sounded like he was making a joke. She must have laughed, and he must have smiled. And then, whether she ate a single shrimp puff or pocketed some of the silverware—it would all be the same.
“It’s okay,” I say nonsensically. “It’s going to be okay.”
She looks at me and seems to see me for the first time, takes in that I am dressed like her, like a servant, but that there’s something off about me. “Who are you? What is this place? What happened to us?”
I asked for her name, so I guess I should give her mine. “I’m Jude. I grew up here. One of my sisters, she can take you over the sea to the human town near here. From there, you can call someone to get you or you can go to the police and they’ll find your people. This is almost over.”
Sophie takes this in. “Is this some kind of—what happened? I remember things, impossible things. And I wanted. No, I couldn’t have wanted…”
Her voice trails off, and I don’t know what to say. I cannot guess the end of her sentence.
“Please, just tell me this isn’t real. I don’t think I can live with any of this being real.” She’s looking around the forest, as though if she can prove it isn’t magic, then nothing else is, either. Which is stupid. All forests are magic.
“Come on,” I say, because while I don’t like the way she’s talking, there’s no point in lying for the sake of making her feel better. She’s going to have to accept that she’s been trapped in Faerie. It’s not as if I have a boat to take her across the water; all I have are Vivi’s ragwort steeds. “Can you walk a little farther now?” The faster she’s back in the human world, the better.
As I get closer to Madoc’s, I remember my cloak, still bunched up and hidden in a woodpile outside Hollow Hall, and curse myself all over again. Leading Sophie to the stables, I seat her in an empty stall. She slumps on the hay. I think the glimpse of the giant toad undid the last of her trust in me.
“Here we are,” I say with forced cheerfulness. “I’m going inside to get my sister, and I want you to wait right here. Promise me.”
She gives me a terrible look. “I can’t do this. I can’t face this.”
“You have to.” My voice comes out harsher than I intended. I stalk into the house and go up the steps as quickly as I can, hoping against hope that I don’t run into anyone else on the way. I fling open the door to Vivienne’s room without bothering to knock.
Vivi, thankfully, is lying on her bed, writing a letter in green ink with drawings of hearts and stars and faces in the margins. She looks up when I come in, tossing back her hair. “That’s an interesting outfit you’ve got on.”
“I did something really stupid,” I say, out of breath.
That makes her push herself up, sliding off the bed and onto her feet. “What happened?”
“I stole a human girl—a human servant—from Prince Balekin, and I need you to help me get her back to the mortal world before anyone finds out.” As I say this, I realize all over again how ridiculous it was for me to do that—how risky, how foolish. He will just find another human willing to make a bad bargain.
But Vivi doesn’t chide me. “Okay, let me put on my shoes. I thought you were going to tell me you’d killed someone.”
“Why would you think that?” I ask.
She snorts as she searches around for boots. Her eyes meet mine as she does up the laces. “Jude, you keep smiling a pleasant smile in front of Madoc, but all I can see anymore is bared teeth.”
I am not sure what to say to that.
She puts on a long, fur-trimmed green coat with frog clasps. “Where is the girl?”
“In the stables,” I say. “I’ll take you—”
Vivi shakes her head. “Absolutely not. You have to get out of those clothes. Put on a dress and go down to dinner and make sure you act like everything’s normal. If someone comes to question you, tell them you’ve been in your room this whole time.”
“No one saw me!” I say.
Vivi gives me her best fish-eyed look. “No one? You’re sure.”
I think of Cardan, riding up as we made our escape, and of the guards, whom I’d lied to. “Probably no one,” I amend. “No one who noticed anything.” If Cardan had, he would never have let me get away. He would never have given up having that much power over me.