Or rather, she tried to put her arms around him. He fought against her hold, staring at her as if she was attacking him, as if she was slowly and deliberately hurting him.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”
Ten said, “Yes. I want to punish them. Bad people have to be punished. I know I’m a—a source. And you’re a sorcerer, aren’t you?”
Something about the little boy’s eyes, his lost mother’s eyes, made Holly feel as if that was an accusation.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not very good yet.”
For no reason Holly could see, news of her enormous incompetence seemed to reassure Ten. The terrible tension of his back eased slightly under her hand, though he was still straining away from her, not letting her really hold him.
“That’s okay. You’ll be good, once you have a source. If you promise to guard everyone, I’ll be your source,” Ten said between gritted teeth.
Holly’s stomach sank. The idea of it, being so close to anyone the way she’d seen Kami struggle with, was horrible. Worse was how Ten looked, trembling and ashen, like a child being dragged to a stake to be burned.
“I can’t do that,” Holly said, hushed. “You’d hate it.”
“But if someone else is going to die otherwise,” Ten said, “it doesn’t matter if I hate it. Rusty is dead. And my mum is dead. They are never coming back.”
Tomo gave a sudden wail like a siren. “Mum’s not!” he said. “She’s not! Dad said she would be all right.”
“You’re a baby and you don’t understand,” Ten snapped. “But I do! My dad and Angela don’t have any magic! Someone might kill them. And that lady, that Lynburn lady, she likes my dad but she doesn’t like Angela. You don’t want anything bad to happen to Angela, do you?”
His eyes made Holly feel not just accused but invaded. They saw too much. His eyes looked too old. Kami had always talked about Ten as shy, as quiet and sweet. Holly didn’t know how he had been, before people started dying and the whole world had changed around him, but he was not sweet now. He might be a child shaking in her arms, but he was clear-eyed and cold.
“No,” Holly whispered. “I’m sorry. I still can’t do it. Not now.”
“Will you do it?” Ten asked, his voice inflexible. “If it looks like we really need to. If there doesn’t seem like any other way, will you swear to me you’ll do it?”
Holly swallowed. “I swear.”
“All right,” said Ten.
Maybe he was relieved to be spared the necessity of having to hand his soul over immediately. He did not show it. He slipped out of Holly’s arms entirely and lay down on his bed, motionless and facing the wall.
“Sorry, but I don’t wanna be your source,” Tomo said, kicking his chair legs. He seemed calm, now that Ten had not directly contradicted him about his mother. “I like you okay and all.”
“Thanks,” said Holly. “I get it. Sometimes you’re just not feeling it.”
She found herself able to grin at him, though it was a rueful grin. Rejected by an eight-year-old. It seemed in keeping with the rest of Holly’s day.
“Ash could be my sorcerer if he wanted. He’s my favorite.” Tomo looked thoughtful. “But I guess he’s Kami’s sorcerer, as well as the other one with the—you know, the messed-up face.”
“Don’t talk about Jared that way!” Holly yelped.
Tomo rolled his eyes and shrugged, seeming to accept this. “Kami seems awful worried about sort of having two. She’s responsible and stuff because she’s the oldest, and it means she doesn’t really enjoy herself. Not like me. I think it would be brilliant fun.”
“I don’t think anything about sorcerers is fun,” Ten said in a low voice.
There was a long silence.
“Are you sure Rusty isn’t coming back?” Tomo asked. “Are you really sure? I think maybe someone made a mistake.”
When he turned the pages of his comic book, his hands shook and he crumpled the pages. But his face stayed smooth. He saw Holly looking at him, and he grinned again.
Holly really hadn’t thought she had any special fondness for children. But she looked at Tomo, so determinedly blithe, and she looked at cold, wounded Ten curled like a comma on his bed and ready to do something that terrified him. She knew suddenly why someone would do anything to protect them. She knew why Rusty had given up everything.
Kami had gone to bed and even slept a little, wrung out after all her tears until misery and exhaustion seemed like the same thing. She was still lying in bed when she felt the shell in her pocket pulse into life.
She called for Ash in her mind.
Come quickly, she said. Get Jared. It’s your mother.
Kami threw herself onto her knees at the foot of the bed, placed the shell on the white bedspread, and waited. Ash and Jared came in and knelt down on the floor at either side of her. Rob Lynburn’s voice, calm and reasonable and reassuring, the voice of a good-old-boy politician, filtered from the shell and echoed around the room.
“I can understand how you must have doubted me,” said Rob. “There was Rosalind and Claire Glass. I know you must have been jealous.”
“Of you?” Lillian demanded, sounding almost amused.
“Perhaps not of your sister,” said Rob. “You have always had such a touching loyalty to your family. But—”
“But Jon’s wife?” Lillian asked, her skepticism as vast as space. “Why would she ever look at you? Did you two even know each other? I would never have noticed. I would never have cared. I have no interest in your behavior or in hers. I suppose you thought it was your due to have every beautiful girl in town at your feet, as the lord of the manor.”
“She was very beautiful,” said Rob. “Far more beautiful than you.”
Lillian laughed.
“I’m sure she makes a very pretty ornament for the town square,” she said, and Kami felt sick at her casual cruelty, hated Lillian for a moment. “The idea that I would care about her beauty is almost as ridiculous as the idea that I would be jealous of your affections. Feel free to bestow them on any unfortunate who passes by you in the street. I never wanted them. I never wanted you.”
“Come, Lillian,” said Rob.
Something about his voice was warm, almost welcoming. If Kami had been asked to guess, she would have guessed that he was holding out his hands to her.
“The game is almost over now. I won and you lost, but I will share my victory with you. It’s true that you never came cringing and smiling to me like other women, as if I would love them if they could apologize enough. You’ve never humbly begged for anything in this world. You just walked through it and demanded all it could give you as a right. I suppose that is why I wanted you, as I wanted no one else. I suppose that is why, stubborn as stone and inflexible as steel though you are, I’ve never loved any other woman.”
“Is this how you love?” Lillian asked slowly. She sounded vaguely surprised, more surprised than she was interested in the answer.
“What other way is there to love, except all-consumingly?” Rob asked. “You are everything to me, and I did everything to possess you.”
“I am not a creature to be owned. No—I do a disservice to creatures. The dog will come to his master’s call, the falcon return to kind hands and a hood, the caged bird will burst into song at the sound of a certain step in the hall. Love is essential for every one. You speak as if I am a jewel, to be tossed from hand to hand. That is insulting.”
“To do anything for you? To consider you of such great value that you were worth any sin?”
“Yes!” said Lillian.
There was a pause.
“Ah well,” said Rob indulgently. “Women can never say they are happy, can they? Of course no compliment is good enough.”
“Go away and leave my town and my sons safe,” said Lillian. “I will even go with you if you want. I would consider that a compliment worth having.”
“Don’t worry, Lillian. Our sons will be safe with us,” Rob assured her. “I think it is a very good sign for peace that you are able to accept my boy Jared as yours too. It shows that you love me, despite what you might think, despite your injured pride, despite yourself.”
Lillian said, “I know very well who I love.”
“No woman has ever been loved by a man as I love you. I gave you a thousand proofs of my love. I gave up years of my life, let my plans for revenge wait, all for you. Not only so I could recover our knives, but for you, because you wanted to find your sister. I spurned your sister for you. I killed Edmund Prescott for you.”
Rob did not sound like a politician now. He sounded like someone from Shakespeare, someone who lived in violently bright colors, a creature of red and gold. The normal person he had pretended to be was a mask. And though Kami had known that for some time, she hadn’t quite realized what the mask was hiding. Delusions of grandeur, she thought: not the least mad of the Lynburns, but the most.
“Very flattering,” said Lillian, dry as bones bleaching in the desert. “I suppose wanting me had nothing to do with wanting Aurimere.”
“Not a thing,” said Rob. “You were what I wanted. Have you not realized yet, my dearest love? I hate Aurimere. I hate Sorry-in-the-Vale. I am going to destroy it all.”
There was a long silence. Kami looked up at Jared. He had been right when he said Rob was planning something. He had been right when he said they were not ready.
Kami did not know what the others were thinking, but she felt as if she was following the steps to an inevitable conclusion: how Lillian had spoken of immortality as something you would have to kill hundreds for, Sorry-in-the-Vale as a source of power for generations of sorcerers, how Rob got his power and how Rob wanted revenge. Real revenge was not taking Aurimere House: real revenge did not end in a Lynburn in the manor, overlooking the town, time without end. Rob Lynburn did not want to carry on the legacy of the Lynburns. He wanted to walk away laughing.
One more sacrifice. Then I promise you on my word as the Lynburn of Aurimere, there will be peace for Sorry-in-the-Vale.
How he must have laughed, thinking about how he would keep that promise.
He was not laughing now. He sounded very solemn. “Your parents were my bitter enemies, and you have always been determined to follow their example, to walk the same tired path your parents walked, in narrow-minded blindness. It has been a dark irony and a torment to me that I should love you above all others.”
“Very romantic,” said Lillian, her voice now like the sound of snapping dry bones in her bare hands. “A middle-aged Romeo, and a Juliet who wants a divorce.”
“The time has come to stop tearing at each other. We are made of the same stuff, Lillian, if you would only see it. It is simply that my vision is grander than yours. I see a greater future for both of us, for our children, than you have ever been able to imagine in all your narrow dreams of this cold house and this pathetic town. We do not have to waste our lives in this backwater. There are a few other sorcerers in London, in Hong Kong, in Berlin—not the desperate strays hardly worthy to be called sorcerers that we are most familiar with—these are true magical aristocrats, with true power. They know how to take the power from sources, rather than letting sources control them. They know that those without magic are cattle to be used and disposed of, not pets to be cosseted. We could join them, be part of the true elite rather than moldering here in this medieval old house, pretending to rule over a rabble who grow more disrespectful every year and who do not deserve any of the benefits we have showered upon them or the mercy we have shown them. We could be immortal. We could be glorious.”
“And how is all this glory to be attained?”