“Lillian’s my sister,” Mom snapped, claiming Aunt Lillian apparently as easy as claiming Jared was impossible. “I don’t want her hurt. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her at all.”
Jared felt his lip curl. “But you want her husband.”
“He was mine first!” Jared’s mother said. “He came to me, all through our childhood. I was the one he told about my parents killing his. I was the one he told about his plans to get justice. I was the one who understood him. Lillian never did.”
So Rob had laid the guilt of murder on another child’s shoulders. Because to Rob and Rosalind both, killing regular people wouldn’t have mattered. But killing Lynburns, especially to defeat other people, well. That was a real crime. That had to be avenged.
Jared was used to hating his mother and feeling painfully sorry for her. He crushed both feelings down.
“I bet she didn’t,” Jared said. “But Rob will either reconcile with her or hurt her. And you don’t want him to do either. So why not let me take her away?” He hoped that his mother would assume he meant “and then we will never come back,” rather than what he was actually thinking: “and then Aunt Lillian will take back Aurimere and murder Rob.”
“Just open the door, Mother,” Jared said. “That’s all you have to do.”
“You can’t open the door,” she said in a rush. “There’s an alarm spell, and a spell on the lock as well. Two different sorcerers did the spells. You can’t concentrate on opening the door, because you’ll set off the alarm. And if you concentrate on silencing the alarm, you won’t be able to open the door.”
“Won’t I?” Jared asked. “You’re forgetting I’m a delinquent.” He concentrated on the alarm spell and reached forward, stomach lurching as his mother shied away from him and stared at him with wide horrified eyes. “I would never hurt you,” Jared whispered, and slid the earring out of her ear.
He unwound the wire and slotted it into the lock, listening for the click of the lock giving, the satisfaction of the handle turning under his palm. The door fetched up against an obstruction: Jared put his shoulder to it, hard, and heard wood splinter. The door swung open; splinters the size of daggers lay scattered across the floor.
Jared slanted a look over at his mother. “Look, Mom. Just like magic.” He stepped over the splinters and stood by the gauze-draped bed. Aunt Lillian lay there unconscious. Her face was slack and defenseless, robbed of character.
Jared heard the sound of an indrawn breath and turned to see his mother at the doorway.
“She looks like me,” his mother murmured. It seemed an absurd thing to say about her identical twin, but Jared looked at Aunt Lillian, so terribly vulnerable, and saw what she meant.
He also saw Aunt Lillian’s fists, closing on the material of the bedclothes, trying to fight her way out of unconsciousness. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, walking over to the bed and pulling Aunt Lillian up into his arms. “You two look nothing alike.”
Aunt Lillian was tall, and had some muscle, and her body was limp with unconsciousness: she was rather a heavy armful. But Jared found himself tucking his chin protectively on the top of her head. It didn’t matter that the muscles in his arms burned holding her. She was a welcome weight.
“You’re very strong,” his mother murmured. “Like your father.”
“Which father would that be?” Jared asked. It was a casual enough question, meant only as an insult flung back at her in return. But his mother looked at him silently, her lips parted, and it became more than that.
“Oh well.” Jared would have shrugged if not for the burden of Aunt Lillian. “If you don’t know, I guess I never will.”
“Rob wants you,” she said again.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jared told her. “I don’t want him.” He walked toward the door carrying Aunt Lillian. His mother retreated before him, her eyes wary as the eyes of an animal that has been incessantly hurt and cannot trust again.
“You don’t need him either,” Jared said. The words burst out of his throat. “Come on, Mom. Come with us. That’s all you need to do. Just leave him: just walk away.”
His mother shook her head, and it seemed to Jared that perhaps she couldn’t leave: perhaps so much of her had grown around Rob that she would have to tear herself away and break in the process.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me where Tenri Glass is.”
His mother shook her head again, but this time it was instant and vehement. “No. Rob would be furious.”
“And he won’t be furious about Lillian?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. Her voice echoed down the corridor in a way that made chills run down Jared’s spine.
“You’re all mixed up about that girl,” his mother continued. “You always were. You were forever insisting that she was real.”
“You swore to me that she wasn’t.”
“I was telling you the truth!” His mother’s eyes glowed, the eyes of something hunted in a wood. “She isn’t real. You have to see that. The people who can’t do magic, who aren’t connected to the earth, they aren’t real. Not the way we are.”
Jared looked into her eyes and said, “She was always more real to me than you.” If he hadn’t had Kami in his head to turn to, he wondered, would he have turned to his mother? Would she have loved him, if he had?
“Where’s Ten?” he asked. “I’m coming back for him. The only thing you can do is help me not get caught when I do.”
His mother trembled.
“Or do you want me to get caught?” Jared asked.
“No,” his mother said, the word less than a breath. “I want you safe. The child is in the attic.”
“Thank you,” Jared said. He walked down the corridor with Aunt Lillian cradled in his arms. He left his mother behind.
His tread walking down the stairs was heavier, and the shadows could scarcely wrap around both of them. Jared was sure someone would hear, or see, but he kept walking and no one did. He walked into the Aurimere garden and out through the fire again: it parted easily as if it was glad to have them free. And then they were past the fire and away from Aurimere, safe in the cool dark.
Jared laid Aunt Lillian on the ground. Her hair spread out like a river, locks forming silver tributaries in the dark grass. She stirred and muttered something, sounding imperious and lost at once.
“God, Aunt Lillian, you idiot,” Jared said, stooping over her and brushing back the hair from her face. “What did you think you were doing?”
She lay there, silent and safe. Jared settled shadow over her like a blanket and turned back to the leaping flames, leaving her hidden in the friendly dark.
* * *
Aurimere was less welcoming this time, as if the house was angry he had been stupid enough to return. The reflection of the fire cast evil red glints on the glass, as if behind every window there were watching eyes narrowed in laughter. Jared touched the walls as he went by apologetically. The firelight made them look like real gold.
He went to the same door, slipped up the same stairs, but this time when he reached the second floor he kept going. The next flight of stairs was dark and familiar to him: when he touched the banister, he felt the carving in the wood that formed flowers in running water, twined in a drowning woman’s hair.
Jared had to open a few doors before he found the stairs that led to the attic: he had not gone up there often. The door that led up to the attic was painted white. It had a round doorknob.
The ordinary door actually gave Jared pause, but he did not pause for long. He walked up the fragile wooden stairs, and when his foot hit a step he called on the air to muffle the creak. He called the darkness to wrap around him.
Shadow and silence, silence and shadow, every step. Nobody would see or hear him coming.
When he reached the attic, he looked around and saw oriel windows that the moonlight was shining directly through. They looked like huge pearls, softly glowing in the dark walls.
For a moment everything seemed to be shadows and silence, and Jared thought he had been wrong. Then he heard the low murmur of Rob’s voice and knew that his mother had betrayed him after all.
He walked through the dark, toward the sound of Rob Lynburn speaking. He opened one door, begging the hinges to stay quiet, and crossed a dark room. There was light seeping in from the cracks of the closed door across the room. Electric light, slipping easy and yellow as butter under the door, and the murmur of Rob’s low pleasant voice. Jared would have liked to fight him, but there was Ten to think of. He had to wait Rob out.
“I thought you would be pleased,” his mother’s voice said.
Jared concentrated on the door, pleading for quiet, begging with the air not to carry sound, and it swung silently open, just a few crucial inches. There was furniture in the room beyond, swathed in white sheets. It looked like an entire sofa set had died and been wrapped in shrouds.
He looked around the door and saw Rob standing over his mother, so much taller than her that he appeared to be looming. Neither of them was looking at the door.
Jared took a chance. He pulled the shadows close, so close that the darkness faded and moonlight spread into the corners of the empty room where he stood, and he could hardly see. He went down low and crossed, in two swift steps, to behind the shrouded couch.
Once crouched down there, he told himself he was an idiot. His mother had told Rob where he was headed. She had not given a second thought to betraying him. He should not dream of trying to help her.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Rosalind,” Rob said. He put a hand against her throat, gently turning her face up to his. “When exactly did you see Jared?”
The lightbulbs in this room were not shaded but set in clear glass casements, and the na**d electric light sheened his mother’s lashes with gold. It seemed like a gold shutter obliterated the color of her eyes for a moment as she blinked. “I—I don’t understand.”
“Before he took Lillian?” Rob inquired. “Or after he took her? She’s my wife. She’s valuable. You should have known that the thing to do was instantly raise an alarm.”
“He would have fought,” Jared’s mother said with commendable speed. “He’s unstable. I’ve told you that. I thought you wouldn’t want to risk your sorcerers, I thought it would be better to catch him by surprise.”
“You thought it would be better to lose Lillian than risk sorcerers who aren’t even Lynburns?” Rob asked. He was caressing his mother’s tumbled hair, hands and voice steady, kind. “Oh, Rosalind,” he said. “Try again.”
She retreated back into the safe territory of incomprehension. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t believe you,” Rob told her. The tone of his voice was so reassuring. “Rosalind. Fool me once . . . and you did, didn’t you? Now you’ve let me down again. The others, they’re mistaken, they’re being stupid, but at least when they see the light I’ll know I can trust them. How can I fight with you at my back when you might change your mind at any time, Rosalind? How can I trust you? I simply can’t.”
His voice was like a lullaby. It was hard to make out the actual words and not respond to the tone: Jared saw his mother straining in toward Rob, face open and eager to make it up to him. “You can,” she assured him. “Rob, I’m sorry. I love you. You have to believe me. I love you. I love you.”
“Shhh,” said Rob. He laid his cheek against her shining hair. “Hush now. I believe you. I do.” Jared hardly saw him move, in the shadowed space between their two bodies. He was aware of Rob’s hand going to his belt, but it seemed like a meaningless gesture until he saw Rob’s arm go back, saw the clean purposeful thrust. “I have only ever loved one woman,” Rob told her gently. “And it wasn’t you.”