The magic takes hold of Kartik, and now I see what he’s done. He’s let the tree claim him in exchange. Ann and Felicity reach out to me. Fowlson tries to hold me back, but I break away.
It’s too late to reverse the magic. The Winterlands have accepted Kartik’s bargain.
“If I could go back…undo it…,” I say, sobbing.
“There is never any turning back, Gemma. You have to go forward. Make the future yours,” Kartik says.
He kisses me sweetly on the lips, and I return his kiss until the vines twine themselves round his throat and his lips go cold. The last sound I hear from him is my name spoken softly. “Gemma…”
The tree accepts him. He is gone. Only his voice remains, echoing my name on the wind.
The trackers point. “She still has the Temple magic! We might have it yet!”
I push them back with the force of my power. “This is what you would fight for? Kill for? What you would try to hoard or protect? No more,” I say, my lips still warm with Kartik’s kiss. “The magic was meant to be shared. None of you will hold it! I will give the magic back to the land!”
I put my hands to the broken earth. “I give this magic back to the realms and the Winterlands, too, that it may be shared equally among the tribes!”
The trackers shriek and howl as if in pain. The souls they have captured push through me on their way to wherever it is we go from here. I feel their passage. It is rather like the swoop of a carnival ride. And when they have gone, there is no one to lead the others, the dead. They stare in wonder, no longer sure what has happened or what will be.
The pale things that hide in the crevices and the cracks of the Winterlands crawl closer. The tree’s warmth melts a small patch of ice at its base. Thin shoots of grass struggle up through the new earth. I touch them and they are as soft as Kartik’s fingers on my arm.
Something in me breaks open. My face is slick with tears. So I do what I yearn to do. I sink into the burgeoning grass and cry.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
MRS. NIGHTWING WAITS FOR US IN THE CHAPEL, WHERE she cradles the body of Mother Elena.
“The creatures?” Ann asks, her voice ragged with the screams she’s spent.
Mrs. Nightwing shakes her head. “Her heart. She didn’t fall to them. There is that, at least.”
Mrs. Nightwing counts us as we file past—Felicity, Ann, Fowlson, me.
“Sahirah…?” she whispers. “And—”
I shake my head. She lowers her eyes, and nothing more is said.
The girls of Spence sit huddled together. Their eyes are wide and frightened. What they have seen tonight is beyond teas and balls, curtsies and sonnets.
Mrs. Nightwing puts her hand on my shoulder. “There is nothing more I can tell them. They’ve seen and they are frightened.”
“They should be.” Is it my voice that sounds so hard?
“They can’t know what has happened.”
She wants me to take what magic I have left and blot every memory of this evening from their minds. To make them forget so that they can carry on as before. There will always be the Cecilys, Marthas, and Elizabeths of the world—those who cannot bear the burden of truth. They will drink their tea. Weigh their words. Wear hats against the sun. Squeeze their minds into corsets, lest some errant thought should escape and ruin the smooth illusion they hold of themselves and the world as they like it.
It is a luxury, this forgetting. No one will come to take away the things I wish I had not seen, the things I wish I did not know. I shall have to live with them.
I wrench away from her grip. “Why should I?”
I do it anyway. Once I am certain the girls are asleep, I creep into their rooms, one by one, and lay my hands across their furrowed brows, which wear the trouble of all they’ve witnessed. I watch while those brows ease into smooth, blank canvases beneath my fingers. It is a form of healing, and I am surprised by how much it heals me to do it. When the girls awake, they will remember a strange dream of magic and blood and curious creatures and perhaps a teacher they knew whose name will not spring to their lips. They might strain to remember for a moment, but then they will tell themselves it was only a dream best forgotten.
I have done what Mrs. Nightwing said I should do. But I do not take all their memories from them. I leave them with one small token of their evening: doubt. A feeling that perhaps there is something more. It is nothing more than a seed. Whether it shall grow into something more useful, I cannot say.
When it is time for me to visit Brigid, I find her awake in her little room. “That’s awl righ’, luv. I don’ care to forget, if it’s all the same,” she says, and there are no rowan leaves at her window anymore.