Glenn wrapped her hand around the bracelet.
“Glenn?”
Her hand froze. The voice was thin and dry. Weak. Glenn stared at the bracelet. She willed her hand to take it off, but her fingers wouldn’t move. Her mother said her name, gently, quietly, and then again. Glenn drew her eyes up along her mother’s narrow hips and over the dark stain of blood from her wound, until finally their eyes met.
Her mother’s eyes seemed to be the one thing about her that hadn’t changed. Their beauty was unearthly. Bright blue, the color of lapis. Glenn wanted to look away, and as she did, her own eyes burned.
“Glenn.” The bedclothes rustled as her mother reached for her, but Glenn retreated to the edge of the bed, beyond her grasp. Glenn crossed her arms over her chest and focused intently on the rough weave of the bedcover.
“The Colloquium is here,” Glenn said, forcing the words out mechanically as if she were working through a report in school.
“Without you to stop them, they brought their soldiers across. They’re bombarding towns all along the border.”
The bed creaked. Her mother had drawn the covers to her waist and was leaning against the wall behind her. Glenn fought for the strength to look directly into her deep blue eyes.
“Do you understand?”
Her mother held her gaze, then glanced at Kevin and Opal. “Can we have a moment, please?”
“We don’t have time for that,” Glenn said. “We have to — ”
“A minute, Glenn. That’s all.”
Opal and Kevin stepped away, leaving the room achingly silent.
Glenn gnawed at her lip and tried to hold herself as tightly as possible, her arms straining to still the whirlwind battering away inside her.
“You — ” her mother began and then stopped herself with a small humorless laugh. “I was going to say you cut your hair. But of course you have. It’s been a long time. You can sit, at least. Can’t you?”
Glenn didn’t move.
“Your father made this,” her mother said, her eyes on the bracelet.
“Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How is — ”
“Don’t ask me how he is,” Glenn snapped, a cord of tension ratcheting tighter within her. “Don’t ask me how I am.”
“Glenn, I don’t — I don’t know what I can say to you.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I wanted to come back.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Glenn — ”
“Don’t tell me you couldn’t!” Glenn cried. “Ever since I took that bracelet off, I’ve felt exactly what you felt and I fought it. I stayed who I was. If I could do it, then why couldn’t you?”
“It was different. I — ”
“You didn’t want to! You wanted to be here!” Glenn charged to her mother’s side and bore down on her. “Do you know what happened after you left? Do you know what it did to us? To Dad? To me?!”
Glenn’s throat constricted and the angry tears she had been fighting burned down her cheeks. She hated them, but she couldn’t stop it now.
“It killed him. It killed us!”
“Glenn, wait!”
But Glenn was already out the door, slamming it behind her. She blew past Kevin and Opal, tore through the kitchen and out the front door.
The night was icy cold, with a long moan of wind blowing up from the river. Glenn sucked in gulps of air, but they only made the shudders that were racking her body worse. The Magisterium rushed in around her, desperate for a way in. The grass and the trees thrummed with life. The earth churned. The nightshade was fading. Glenn tried to push back the tide, but it hammered at her over and over. She’d be helpless against it soon.
“Here. Take this.”
Aamon was kneeling beside her, a bowl of the nightshade in his hand. After what she did to him in the house, a rush of shame filled her to be so close to him again.
“Hurry,” he said.
Glenn took the bowl from him and forced the liquid down her throat, nearly retching at the foulness of it. As it sank into her, it became a little easier to push the thousand sensations pressing into her away, but only slightly.
“It’s not working like it did,” Glenn said.
“Your body gets used to it. It doesn’t matter. We’ll get you and Kevin home.”
“I can’t go home,” Glenn said. “I can’t ever go home. Not now.”
Aamon said nothing. What could he say? It was true. As the
nightshade did its job, Glenn’s head began to clear, as if a curtain had been drawn down between her and the world. A tremor shook the thin woods around her. Another explosion far off.
“You knew she was here the whole time,” Glenn said. “Why
didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you might try and see her.”
“When you came for her,” Glenn said, “did you know what
would happen to her if she returned?”
Aamon lowered his head. A broad silence fell between them.
“I knew it was possible,” he said. Even through the nightshade, Glenn could feel the keenness of the pain inside him. “I was created to serve the Magisterium. Farrick and his revolution wanted to destroy that. I did whatever I had to do to stop him. When your grandparents were killed, your mother was next in line to rule. It was my responsibility to bring her back. That’s all I knew or cared about. But then she told me to stay with you, to look after you and … you said you thought it must have been horrible, being Hopkins, but it wasn’t.”
Aamon moved his hands over his blood-matted arms.
“It was a relief.”
The lines of Aamon’s face and the splashes of blood were at once alien and so familiar. She had seen him like this before, long ago. A small broken thing needing to be saved. Glenn reached out and took his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Glenn said.
“For what?”
The images flashed in Glenn’s mind again. Aamon and the man in the river. Aamon and Garen Tom. Aamon kneeling at a shattered altar, begging for forgiveness.
“That you had to be that person again because of me.”
“I would do it again if I had to,” he said. “For you.”
“What do we do?” Glenn asked. “We can’t go home again.
Sturges would never allow it. Not now.”
“There are places in the Magisterium that maybe even Michael Sturges will fear to go. We’ll stay there until we can fight back. Opal can help you. Teach you how to control your Affinity.”
Beyond the trees, the sky was covered with clouds and the
drifting smoke of a hundred battles near and far. There was no path of stars, no constellations writing messages across the sky.
They could hide, but for how long? Until Sturges wrestled the secret of her father’s work away from him and used it to tear the last bits of the Magisterium apart? Glenn imagined an army of skiffs and drones flooding the farms and villages of the Magisterium and shivered.
How many more people would die while she hid?
“Aamon?”
They both turned and there, in the doorway, stood the Magistra.
She was barefoot, dressed in a white gown that hung off her frail body in billows. She had one hand pressed into the doorway to hold herself up.
Glenn tightened her hand on Aamon’s. He squeezed her hand
back and then left her in the yard to disappear into the house. Her mother’s footsteps whispered across the grass, stopping just behind Glenn.
“I was your age when it started,” she said. “I was in the orchards outside my parents’ castle, and a bird landed on one of the branches. A callowell. Black, with a long silver-tipped tail. Beautiful. It landed on an apple tree nearby so I got a net and tried to coax it in, but I got too close and it pecked my hand hard enough to draw blood. Then it just stared at me with these black hateful eyes. I stood there, furious, watching my blood fall into the grass. That’s when I felt it for the first time.”
Glenn turned. Her mother was staring down into the grass. She looked small and pale. Not at all the towering Magistra.
“I stood there, watching my blood fall, and a million voices began screaming in my ears all at once. The orchard. The sky. The people in the castle. The callowell. All of it rushed into me. I could feel the callowell’s heart, this bright tiny thing. So delicate. It was like it was sitting in the palm of my hand and all I had to do was …”