He sat on the earth, legs still in the cool deep water, one hand in the deep spring-soft grass and one set against his brother’s heart.
Come back, he said. Come on. Come home.
Home. Not to Aurimere, but to him and to Aunt Lillian. Jared thought about Ash, reaching out to Jared no matter how many times Jared turned him away, of all the good about Ash that he had ever been jealous of.
Ash’s eyes opened, the same color as the sky, which was now washed clean of clouds.
“We need to get there now,” Ash said, starting up. “We’re going to be too late.”
“Come on,” said Jared. “Aunt Lillian did it. Amber and Ross did it. We’re Lynburns, aren’t we? Don’t tell me there’s anything we can’t do. Let’s not get there. Let’s be there already.”
He was still holding Ash’s hand when they wished themselves from the soft grass and the calm waters to the heart of their town, and found themselves on the High Street of Sorry-in-the-Vale.
Jared looked up at his father’s shocked face and saw the moment when he realized what they must have done—saw his father raise his hand to strike him down. Jared felt the catch of his scar twisting his smile out of shape, and he only smiled wider.
“Don’t you touch him!”
Martha Wright stooped in the swirling water and debris, then stood with one of the cobblestones clutched in her fist. She drew her arm back and hurled it with all her might.
The people of Sorry-in-the-Vale watched as the lord of Aurimere staggered backward, blood streaming down his face.
Jared dropped Ash’s hand, bolted across the street to stand in front of Martha with power gathering in both his hands. It streamed to him out of the air.
“Don’t touch her,” he said.
Angela was circling Ruth Sherman, spinning her chain over her head. He could see his aunt Lillian, with Kami’s dad. Her hands were full of light, and the light was shed on every soul she could see, protecting, blessing, keeping no power for herself. People were turning their faces toward the light, toward her.
Then there was sudden unrest in the group of sorcerers behind Rob.
“Did you kill my brother?” Hugh Prescott asked suddenly, loudly, as if the words had been waiting in his mouth for days and had to come out now.
“What?” snapped Rob, waving his hand as if the question was an irritating fly. “Why are you bothering about this now? That was twenty years ago!”
“He did it,” Jared called out. “He killed him. I saw him. He’s been walled up dead in Aurimere for twenty years. This whole town will be dead with him if Rob has his way.”
Rob turned on Jared, furious, but he did not even have a chance to lift his hand. Holly’s father gave a great bellow like a wounded animal and plowed directly into Rob’s back.
Ross Philips lifted a hand to help his leader, but Amber Green caught it and forced it down. Alison Prescott ran to help her husband. And Dorothy, the town librarian, a woman with no magic at all, ran through the water and dived at a sorcerer who was going for Alison Prescott.
Sergeant Kenn punched Jared in the face: Jared felt his lip break. He tasted blood as he laughed, and punched him back.
“What do you people think you’re doing?” Ruth Sherman demanded. “What do you think you can do?”
Angela stopped twirling her chain and punched Ruth Sherman in the face.
“We’re fighting,” she said. “My brother taught me that.”
It was some of Rob’s sorcerers, but not all, rising up against him. It was some of the townspeople, though not all, flooding into the street to fight sorcerers with whatever they could find.
It was chaos, but Jared felt like it was a bright hopeful chaos, the sound of fighting ringing with the bells. They were all together, sorcerers and ordinary mortals, the guilty and the innocent. They were different but united in sudden determination. They were not giving up their town without a fight.
Kami and Holly raced to the farthest outskirts of town, to the fields and hills, and they chased the clouds away. Everywhere they went, gold followed. They passed the house where Rob Lynburn and his parents had killed, Monkshood Abbey, and Kami felt it as a blot on the landscape: bloodstained and unredeemed. It was no part of the town she believed in, no part of the home she loved.
Kami held on tight to Holly, felt Holly’s laugh go all the way through her, and raised her free hand.
A ray of light from the sun went rogue, streaked down from the sky like a falling star and hit that low dark dwelling. A crack appeared in the roof and spread in a wild, jagged zigzag down the gray façade of the house. The fissure widened and the winds blew in wild, and the house shattered like a mirror, into nothing but dust.
Kami thought she heard a tumult of sound, like shouting underwater. She thought of Rob’s victims, the victims of all the Lynburns.
No more of the Lynburns’ stories, Kami thought. My story now, just as real as theirs. More real, because the story was hers. She was not going to let anyone tell her that her story was less important than anyone else’s. She was going to believe in it with all her heart.
Jared had said Rusty was not gone, and he had been more right than he knew. Kami should have realized that, all this time.
If the Lynburns had drawn power from death as well as life, she could too. If the power was here, some part of the people it had come from must be here too.Those the Lynburns had killed would not want to help them. They would want to help her, to save the people they loved and to protect the town that was their home. If there had been power in their deaths, there had been more power in their lives. Kami thought of Rusty and how he had chosen to give his life, a sacrifice offered not out of fear but from the desire to shield and preserve, a sacrifice offered without being asked. She thought of her grandmother who had lived for decades in this town and would never have borne any of this, thought of Lillian’s poor lost sorcerers, thought of the stranger Henry Thornton’s kindness.
She had thought they were lost, but if some part of them had been made into magic, then it was not Rob Lynburn’s magic. Then they were not lost at all. She could not be lost, either. She did not know why she had ever feared it.
Why be broken, when you can be gold?
They drove around Aurimere itself, and Kami felt the mellow gold of the stones seep into her, knew the wild glory of the growing garden, the memories kept in paint and stone. The Lynburns did not get to be the only ones who told the stories anymore, but the Lynburns were part of the story too. Elinor Lynburn had put her golden bells under the water, but they had not been lost. They had only been waiting to be woken to life, to warn and to protect. Every Lynburn who had loved their town, she took them all with her.
The murmuring that had started in her ears when Monkshood Abbey fell came to her louder and louder, a glad tide washing up on her shores. She could feel the sunlight laid on her like a blanket by her grandmother’s loving hands, she could feel wind rushing and leaves whispering like Rusty’s low laugh. She could feel Ash, and most of all Jared.
Her friends were in the streets below, in the rising waters, struggling and never surrendering. She saw Angela swinging her chain against Ruth the sorceress.
She came down from the golden house and into the High Street, and she carried the town with her as an army that could not be defeated. Never sorry, never stopping, a world within a world. She was the world. She was sorcery in the vale.
Rob Lynburn was in her way.
He turned and looked at her, his arrogant head held high. He looked surprised and offended, his lips parted as if he was going to ask what she was doing there.
The very stones cried out against him. This town was too big for him. He had never understood that.
Water came to drown him, earth to bury him, fire to burn him, and air to carry every particle of the dust that had been him away from their town.
The supernova of the elements, the whirl of air and light, was too much to look at. But Kami kept looking. She did not see any of what they told her later had happened, how Jared and Angela chased off Sergeant Kenn and Ruth, how the other sorcerers left Rob at the last. The only thing she saw was Rob Lynburn vanishing, a stain of red and gold being wiped from her town.
When it was done, Kami could not look at any of them. She turned, chasing the last of the magic, the last bright dizzying moments of exhilaration and strength that felt like the strength of stone and mountains, of the hatred turned to dust and the love that had lasted.
She went wading through the water, stumbling on the tumbled cobblestones as if they were the stones on the bottom of a riverbed. There was a blockage in the middle of the High Street, where it was the narrowest before it opened up into the town square. A fallen street sign and a tree trunk had formed a dam there, choked with leaves and branches, the water foaming and gurgling.
Kami did not dare waste a drop of magic. She tried to scramble over it, and then Jared was at her side. He stooped and slid an arm around her, put his other arm under her legs, and lifted her against his chest for a moment. Then he helped her over the obstacle in her path.
She ran down into the town square, laid her warm hand in her mother’s cool stone palm, and held her breath. All she felt was stone against flesh, her heart sinking and her blood pounding under her skin; all this magic and life, and yet she could not help her.
Nobody had ever gained anything by despair. She pressed her mother’s hands, so hard that her own hands hurt. Then she felt, so gently at first that she thought it might be her imagination and then with a stronger pressure, her mother trying to hold her hands back.
From an enchanted faraway place, she called her mother back, from stone to flesh, from grave to embrace. Kami felt her mother’s hands clinging, and slid her hands up her mother’s arm, cupped her mother’s face, as her mother’s hair turned from dead white to warm chestnut. Her skin flushed, and the light washed along the suddenly bright curl of her eyelashes as they fluttered open.
Her mother took her first breath in over a month, a gasping sob, and fell into Kami’s arms.
The sun blazed in the sky. The links between them all were strong and shining, forming a line that bound them each to each like jewels on a chain. Kami looked to Ash, and nodded.
The link snapped. The feeling of being so bound you might blend together faded. Kami put her arms around her mother and knelt with her in the water and the debris, in the center of their wrecked and saved town. The river-soaked gold of Sorry-in-the-Vale glowed in the sunlight like treasure discovered underwater and lifted out into the light.
They had lived. Beyond all hope, they had lived.
And wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,
Between our faces, to catch light on each?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Chapter Twenty-Four
Written in Gold
Sometimes Kami looked back on the day Sorry-in-the-Vale had been saved, and it felt as if she was thinking of a story that had happened to someone else. Everything that had happened still felt important and vital, felt like real things that had happened to those she really loved. She did not forget a moment of it. She knew the value of all she had won, and all she had lost.
She simply could not recapture the shining certainty of it all.
She did not know if the power had fooled her into feeling love in the sun, or hearing whispers in the wind. Kami did not know if it had been spirits or simply the memory of those loved and lost, giving her strength. Kami liked to think that it had been something real, so she could feel as if Jared had been right: that nothing was lost, only changed into what was strange to her.
Rusty and Angela’s parents had come down from London, distressed at the terrible accident they believed had occurred, but Angela had not stood with them in the graveyard. She had stood between Kami and Holly, holding both their hands. She had stood with her family.
They had buried Rusty in a sunny corner of the graveyard, the kind of nook he would have liked to stretch out and nap in. His gravestone was inscribed with gold letters.