But they were not alone together. They could never really be alone together.

“I don’t know how to take you guys through the fire,” she said. “But I think I have enough power. Rob always underestimates what a source can do. I can go through, and I think Holly can too, if I help her. We have to walk through alone, and you all have to wait outside. Is—is that all right?”

“It’s not all right, but I will try to stand outside of and radiate moral support.”

“Like a true gentleman should,” said Kami, patting his arm.

“You don’t have to come with me,” said Kami.

Holly had not wanted everyone to know that she was a sorcerer. It had not escaped Kami’s attention that only Angela had not seemed surprised.

Kami was very much in favor of their great love, and she had tried not to be hurt that she had been left out of the sorcerous information loop. She was not entitled to know everything just because she wanted to know everything … and take detailed notes and ask personal follow-up questions.

She knew she was a pushy person, but that didn’t mean she wanted to push Holly too far. She did not want to make Holly do anything she did not want to do.

Holly stood with her hand in Kami’s. The firelight gilded her curls, turning them from sunshine to real gold.

“I also realize that I could have brought this up before dragging you all the way here,” Kami said. “Sometimes I get too caught up in charging.”

“I like seeing you charge,” said Holly, and grinned. “And I want to do this.”

Her voice was firm, but her hand in Kami’s was trembling slightly. Kami got a firmer grip on it.

“It’s okay if you’re scared.”

Holly lifted her chin. “I’m trying not to be.”

“You don’t have to try. I mean, you’re still awesome if you’re scared. You can do it anyway. Being scared is okay, because it won’t stop you.”

Holly looked at Kami out of the corner of her eye, a little shy and a little doubtful, as Holly was when complimented on the things she believed were her faults.

They walked into the fire together. Kami felt the heat of it, like lifting her face up to the sun on a hot day and feeling its warmth spill onto her face, its light beat against her eyelids.

She heard Holly’s shocked, scared gasp before she felt the pain slice through her own body. It was a new pain, one that seemed both numbing and profoundly more agonizing than the burning that had come before. Every atom of her body seemed turned to crystal and stabbed with knives.

Rob had learned from their two escapes. He had determined he would not be made a fool of a third time.

Within the ring of fire, they had laid a ring of ice.

She was so cold she felt she was burning inside in reaction to it: her blood boiling to nothing, her bones turning to lightning.

All Kami could do was cling to the thought that Rob had so much vanity, and no experience with sources. He had underestimated her, had underestimated her power, over and over. She had to believe he was still doing it. Kami held on tight to Holly’s hand, stopped her retreating back into the fire that waited for them both. Fire hissed behind them, ice tore at them, the pain stretched on, and Kami thought for a moment that she had killed Holly by keeping her captive in this dual ring of pain.

Then suddenly it was over. The cessation of pain was as stunning as the bright wave of agony had been. She opened her eyes and they were standing on the cool grass.

Kami did not hesitate. Every moment was a moment that Rob Lynburn could discover them. She dashed around the back of the house and heard Holly’s footsteps flying after her.

She wanted to slow down as she entered the garden, remembering its late-summer splendor when she had walked into it once before. She had had her first real conversation with Jared here. But she couldn’t let herself be delayed by sentiment, shouldn’t even be thinking of something so silly.

The colors of the budding spring flowers at night were nothing but a blur until she was on her knees by the crumbled stone wall, at the very end of the wall where she had knelt once, where the wall stopped in the center of the garden rather than meeting another wall. Loose stones and flowers were all around her, like a sweet-smelling sea lapping at her knees, and she said, “Here, I think.”

There was no time for spades and shovels, for the childish joy of digging up buried treasure. Kami sent her power into the earth, made it break into a tiny localized earthquake. She found herself sinking in swelling soil, and she scrabbled in the hole she had made, sent her thoughts down into the earth until she found something that was not earth, and then she followed her power with her fingers until her fingers found it too.

A little box, far too small for a coffin, the wood under Kami’s palms slick with a patina of slime. There was a symbol carved on the top of the box, but she could no longer make it out. She tried to undo the rusty catch: it broke off in her hand. When she opened the top of the box by force, it came off in pieces: Kami discarded the lid and looked at what lay at the bottom of the chest in her hands.

It was a pool of shimmering material. Kami remembered reading a book in Aurimere, listing the gifts given to the sorcerers. She remembered one item on the list now, very clearly: silk for Anne Lynburn’s shroud. But if Anne Lynburn had drowned in the river where her sister’s bells had been sunk, never to be seen again, her body had never been found. Her shroud had been used for another purpose.

The spelled silk was like finding a pearl in the heart of the oyster, glowing in the muck and silt of the bottom of the sea. It looked fresh and new as if it was a second away from being laid on a bride’s shining hair.

Kami wondered at the love and loss that had been put into this enchantment, to keep it shining after centuries buried in the dark. She touched it, and something rustled under her hand. She drew back a layer of material, and she heard Holly let out a soft sound near her ear: surprise as much as triumph.

Lying in the pool of cool white silk at the bottom of the rotted ancient box was a letter. The paper was yellow as old bones and the ink was faded as brown as old blood, but it was written by Elinor Lynburn, and it told Kami everything she had been aching to know.

To the Lynburn who discovereth this last relic of Anne Lynburn, I leave a story and a warning.

Our need was dire. Our good king Richard was dead, to the great heaviness of the town. The soldiers of the usurper king marched themselves upon the town we had taken a holy oath to protect. Through mist and enchantment the soldiers came marching, and ere they reached us we acted to keep our vows.

Whereupon under the moon in springtime, before the start of the new year, we went down to the pools. They are made twain, for a sorcerer to go in each. I can scarcely bear to write what was decreed by fate to happen next.

The three of us went down to the Crying Pools and performed the ceremony together. There is a way for sorcerers to help each other during the ceremony of the Crying Pools, and Anne and I shared power so we could do so. There is a way for a source to help a sorcerer complete the ceremony of the Crying Pools. Matthew helped Anne, and then reached through the bond between Anne and me to help me too. Matthew was Anne’s source. Matthew came to be my source. Anne belonged to me and I to her. We married two enchantments, and came away with power in abundance not to be described.

Great power comes with such joining. No soul can bear being so joined. They were doomed to die from the moment that we cast the enchantment. They emerged from the pools cursed to madness and ruin. They did not live to see another dawn.

Remember Matthew and Anne, loving souls and passing well beloved. Farewell sister, farewell love. I live on alone and am called fortunate by fools.

To go three into the lakes is to go into a charnel house.

I pray you do not take this course. Do not do this unless there is no other choice. If you want to live, do not do it. If you want those you love to live, do not do it.

Yet I know that those in their last extremity will do what they must.

When the bells ring, when the first moon of the new year shines, when the cost of keeping your word is breaking your heart, you will go down to the lakes, down, down, down, to your great sorrow.

Elinor Lynburn

In the year of our Lord 1485

Kami looked up from the paper and into Holly’s eyes, wide open with shock, green as the Crying Pools in summertime.

But Holly did not say a word about the letter; instead she said, “Watch out.”

And she grabbed hold of Kami’s arm and hauled her upright, turned her around, so that they were both facing Holly’s mother. Alison Prescott was standing with her feet buried in yellow flowers and her hands shimmering with magic. She was wearing an old, worn green dress, the faded green the same color as her eyes.

Rob had not only put in another circle to cross. He had posted a lookout.

“I won’t let you hurt her,” said Holly, her voice and hands both firm now. She tried to push Kami behind her, but Kami dug her heels in.

Alison hesitated. “I don’t want to hurt either of you.”

“Terrific!” said Kami. “Then we’ll just be going.”

“You know I can’t let you leave with that, dear,” said Alison Prescott, and bent her gaze on Elinor’s letter.

The letter seemed fine for a moment, then one end turned into dead black and warm violet, blurring into flame. For a moment the words “your great sorrow” were lit and highlighted in the waking flame. They became written in shadow against a burning light.

The paper was ashes, crumbling away into charred flakes and soot, leaving Kami with nothing but soiled hands.

Kami could not help but feel a pang. It had been a last relic of Elinor Lynburn, the keeper of all the old secrets Kami had been working so hard to discover ever since the Lynburns returned. They were all lost now, the three who had gone down to the lakes. Matthew Cooper’s statue was dust, and Anne Lynburn had disappeared under water and from all memory. It didn’t matter, Kami told herself. She knew the secret. She could remember it. She could write it down again.

“Come on,” said Holly in her ear. “We were lucky it wasn’t someone else.”

But Kami felt like there had been someone else. Kami still felt watched. Kami looked up, and behind glinting glass she saw the flash of fox fire that was Amber Green’s hair.

In spite of Elinor’s letter, in spite of Holly’s anxious shepherding away, Kami found herself smiling a tiny smile. There was a guard at the window and a guard at the gate, but neither guard had raised the alarm. Two of Rob’s people had let them go.

Kami grasped Holly’s arm as they stepped into the fire. She whispered, softer than the hissing flames, low enough so that nobody on the other side of the fire could hear them: “Don’t tell Jared what the letter said.”

The face of all the world is changed, I think,

Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul. …

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Chapter Fourteen

Lies and Other Love Tales

Holly did not tell. Kami was the one who led the way into the Water Rising, and collected up everyone she could. They all ended up sitting in the parlor: Holly, Ash, Jared, Rusty, Lillian, and Jon. Even Kami’s brothers were there, sitting on the floor.

Even Martha Wright was there.

Kami had stopped at the bar and asked if she wanted to come hear something new. “I wish you would,” Kami had added.

Martha Wright had hesitated, and Kami had been briefly sure she would not do it. Then she had said, with sudden decision, “I’ll come and listen, at least,” and called for her husband to come work behind the bar.

The inn was empty, anyway. There was no sound of customers, no sound in the streets outside the windows. Kami repeated all that she could remember from the letter: all of the parts she had decided would be useful.

She told them that if a source and two sorcerers went to the Crying Pools, and the sorcerers were linked, and one source and sorcerer were linked, a link could be made between all three of them. She told them the conditions that Elinor Lynburn had outlined. She told them of how much power they could gain: perhaps enough to defeat Rob Lynburn, enough to save the town.