They stepped through stone into the wood beyond Aislinn House.
Hydria had already left a black rip between the trees, which were oddly silent and smelled of nothing. They followed quickly, stepped into a great hall full of painted knights drinking from cups held by three women. The tear that Hydria had left was through the sunlight falling into the open doors of the hall. The next rip in the paper world was through a flock of crows.
And then into shadow, walls of stone, dark water flowing silently through the underground cave. Ysabo could smell the water, the dusty, ancient air, feel the chill of a place that sunlight never found.
They were out of the book and in the boat. It was still moored by its chain and the stake hammered into stone. The lantern on its prow was lit. Nemos Moore stood within the light.
“Ah,” he said softly. “You found your way, Mr. Dow.” He nodded to Hydria. “My lady. Ladies. How does it feel to take a simple breath of air after so many years? Wonderful, I would think. Is it?”
He was no longer the elegant, clever, middle-aged man Ysabo had seen before. He was now young and lithe, with long hair and a genial expression not unlike Ridley’s: the traveling scholar, she guessed, whom Hydria would remember welcoming so innocently into her house.
She recognized him, and she didn’t waste time talking to him. She moved in the boat as unflinchingly as she had moved through the pages of the wizard’s book. With one kick she sent the lantern flying to strike and spatter oil all over Nemos Moore before it hit the stone and shattered.
Flames shot up his clothes. He shouted, cursing, and flung himself into the water. The intense, oblivious expression had appeared again on Ridley’s face. He didn’t hear Nemos Moore’s next shout, which sent rocks rattling down among them; he didn’t seem to see the danger Hydria put herself in, trying to push the sorcerer back under the water with her foot. He grabbed at her, cursing again, and she lost her balance, tumbled to the bottom of the boat, which rocked wildly and nearly tossed Ridley overboard.
Something was happening to the boat. It was softening, dwindling, changing shape. Ysabo, feeling it turn under her feet, gasped and grabbed the chain to keep them close to the shore. It came up lightly in her hands; she stared with horror at the empty end of it. The boat drifted toward the middle of the river, passing Nemos Moore, shoulder deep in water as he reached the shore. He pulled himself up on the stones and turned.
He said Ridley’s name. It came out in gusts of color, gouts of glittering shadow that fell over Ridley like rain. He stopped moving, looking vaguely surprised by something he didn’t expect. Nemos Moore said Hydria’s name. She, too, grew still beneath the rain of her name, though her desperate, furious face recognized the spell. Nemos Moore looked at Ysabo.
She moved before he said her name, whipping the chain across the water, sending it curling around his knees. She wrenched at it. Then the boat turned like a live thing under her feet, and flung her backward into the water.
When she surfaced again, coughing and clutching the motionless, floating bodies that had slid in with her, she saw a tall old man with hair like moss and skin like melted wax standing in the water. He held the wizard’s book open with his hands. His eyes were locked on Nemos Moore, who was back in the water, shouting something at the chain around his knees.
The old man slammed the book shut, and Nemos vanished.
He ran his hand over it, murmuring. A seal flowed over the closed pages, hiding them, binding the book together from cover to cover. Ridley and Hydria came to life abruptly, floundering until they caught their footing, their heads turning this way and that, searching for the missing Nemos Moore. They found the wizard instead.
“Blagdon!” Hydria exclaimed, her wet hands over her mouth. “You’re still alive!”
“My thanks to that young man,” he answered.
“Yes, mine, too,” she answered tightly. “He saved my life. But where’s the other one? Nemos Moore?”
The old man smiled, a sweet, oddly content expression for someone who had been chained in water for a very long time and still hadn’t found his way out.
“I closed the book on him.”
He declined with thanks and went off somewhere with the wizard instead.
They escorted Ysabo to her chambers, which seemed to be exactly where they had always been in a house whose bustlings were at once domestic and unfamiliar. As they passed through the great hall to the stairs, someone flung open the broad doors through which the knights rode at midday. But the knights seemed to be elsewhere; the hall, except for musicians and elderly courtiers playing chess, was oddly peaceful. Nothing came in the door but light and wind, the soughing of the trees, the surprising sounds, beyond the courtyard walls, of a blacksmith’s hammer, the bellow of some barnyard animal.
It was as though several different times had merged, like ripples in water crossing one another, changing shape, forming a new pattern. One of the ripples had to do with the wizard’s book; another with the spellbound house and those who had been born and lived and died within that dark time while the queen and the wizard had been imprisoned; a third had to do with Queen Hydria’s house as it had been, generous, rich, happy, before Nemos Moore had found his way into it. Nothing had been lost, Ysabo realized slowly and with wonder, except a thoroughly wicked sorcerer, who existed now only in the pages of a book.
The servants delivered her into the hands of her ladies, who took such delight in her return that they rendered her nearly speechless. They exclaimed over her wet clothes and seemed to think she had fallen into a stream while riding in the wood. Their smiling eyes suggested some romantic import to the mythical ride, part of which she must surely have enjoyed.
Ysabo found it easiest just to agree with everything they said.
A pair of them escorted her to Maeve’s chambers; as usual, Aveline was with her.
The ripples of time had flowed a bit differently through their memories. They welcomed Ysabo with relief; she was not sure how long she had been trapped in the bell chamber, but apparently long enough for them to worry.
“We haven’t seen you all day,” Aveline said. “No one could find you. Were you with Zondros?”
“Zondros.” Belatedly, she remembered a knight with ivory hair and black brows; she wondered if he still existed, or if he had turned back into a painting in Blagdon’s book. “Oh. Mostly I—ah—I was immersed in a book.”
They took it with remarkable calm, this shattering of ritual. “We missed you,” Aveline murmured, smoothing Ysabo’s drying hair. There was no sign in the room of the wedding dress; it must have gone the way of the paper knights, she realized with relief.
The door opened; a lady murmured, “Queen Hydria.”
Maeve and Aveline stared at one another. Maeve dropped her embroidery; they both rose hastily, and curtsied to the tall queen, whose gray and black hair swirled now into a braided pile on her head, whose exquisite green gown and blue mantle matched her teal eyes. She wore a crescent of gold in her hair, jewels on her fingers, in her shoes.
She smiled at them. They gazed at her silently, memories coming and going in their eyes. Was she a dream? Their faces wondered. Were they the dream? Whose story had they all been in?
Aveline spoke first, huskily. “My lady. You have been gone—No, we have—Where have we all been all this time? And how old have we gotten to be?”
“You remember,” Hydria said gently, with a sigh of relief. “Please. Sit with me. We can get to know one another.”
“Did we ever?” Maeve asked confusedly. “Or are you a story that Nemos Moore told us long ago?”
“Perhaps. I have been spellbound, like this house, for a very long time. Years past my counting. You both know Nemos Moore?”