Jared made a relenting sound, half grumble and half sigh, and reached over to help Ash up. “All right, let’s get you home,” he said, and Kami realized he meant Aurimere.

They were all talking as they left the woods, Angela and Kami about how they could apply this new knowledge to fighting sorcerers, Kami planning what they would tell Lillian, with Jared contributing that they could possibly bypass Lillian and tell the sorcerers she was training, and Holly volunteering to speak to Mrs. Thompson because she was her great-aunt. Rusty was plaintively talking about dinnertime.

Ash had color back in his face by the time they were out of the woods and walking up to Aurimere, but Kami drew level with him so she could check on him anyway.

“How are you holding up? I’m sorry about Jared,” she added, loudly enough so that Jared could hear, and he tossed a grin at her over his shoulder. “He is incorrigible,” Kami said. “He cannot be corriged. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“He doesn’t bother me,” said Ash, easily enough so she thought it might almost be true. “Give me a little time and I’ll be fine.”

Ash looked sorry as soon as he had said it, and the rest of them went quiet. They had so little time left.

In the silence, Kami looked up the curving path to Aurimere and saw someone coming down it. The sky was darkening and the sun was in her eyes, so at first all her vision was able to resolve was a dark shape. Then the details coalesced: the springy mass of brown curls, the thin serious face, the beaky nose and the glasses perched on top of it.

Henry Thornton.

Kami left Ash’s side and ran up the path, not stopping until she was standing just a foot away from him. She saw Henry look at her, going through the same process she had: confusion followed by recognition based on a single encounter, matching her up with the voice on the phone that had begged him to please help, to please try.

“You came,” Kami said at last.

Henry smiled, a shy and slightly nervous smile. “I did,” he said. “I had to. You—you sounded as if you were in real trouble.”

“Oh, we are. Thank you,” said Kami as the others drew level with them.

Henry’s gaze skittered warily over the faces of Jared and Ash, the Lynburns. Appreciation flickered briefly in his eyes when he saw Angela and Holly, who were sort of overwhelming placed side by side, but his eyes were dragged back to the Lynburns. Kami wondered just what Rob had done to him to scare him so badly.

Ash absorbed the situation at a glance and took charge of it gracefully. “Welcome to Aurimere,” he said, extending his hand, making a bloody boy in a dusty road seem like a lord greeting an honored guest. “I can’t express how glad we are to see you.”

Henry hesitated, but accepted Ash’s hand and faintly returned his smile. It was very hard to resist Ash’s charm when he turned it full on, Kami thought, even when you knew that he was playing you.

“Hey, man,” Rusty said, seeming to note this was an important occasion and giving Henry a sleepy grin. “Who are you again?”

“You must stay at Aurimere,” Ash said, sweeping away the awkward pause. “You and everyone you have brought with you. You’re all friends of Aurimere now. You’re most welcome.”

There was a much more awkward pause then. Henry looked at them all as if he was so sorry.

He did not have to say a word. They all stood there on the path to Aurimere, silent and huddled together against the cold realization that Henry had come alone: that Rob was coming tomorrow, and there would be nobody to help them.

PART VI

STORM CLOUDS GATHER

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

This is the poem of the air, Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair. . . .

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Chapter Twenty-Four

Farewell Fear

Lillian took Henry’s news without turning a hair.

“I asked everyone I could think of,” Henry said, standing humbly by the mantel in the drawing room. “People I didn’t know, that my mother had only heard about. Everybody said that Sorry-in-the-Vale makes its own laws and should be left to itself.”

“That much is true,” Lillian murmured.

Henry looked like a tradesman summoned in to hear the lady of the manor’s pleasure. Kami could envision him twisting his cap between his hands.

“All the sorcerers I’ve been in touch with, we don’t have much power. We don’t have traditions or official records. There are a few powerful families, but they keep to themselves. We don’t have a community of sorcerers like you do.”

“Because this community is working out so well,” Kami said.

Lillian turned her ice-gray gaze on Kami. “This is sorcerers’ business.”

“Anything that’s my business is Kami’s business,” Jared said. He was leaning against the wall, and had nodded at Rusty and Ash to join him; they were standing on either side of him.

Kami had not realized quite what he was doing until she tilted her head and saw him from the angle Lillian was seeing him: he, Ash, and Rusty had formed a team behind Henry, having his back.

“We have no time,” Kami said. “We’re all in this together, because we all suffer if Rob wins. You’re going to have to put up with me. I’m not going away.”

Lillian’s hair was loose for a change, and she looked tired, eyes sunken in her face. It made her look frighteningly like Rosalind. “Fine,” she said. “We have to make a contingency plan anyway.”

Ash started. “Mother, what do you mean?”

“If Rob wins,” said Lillian. “I’m not saying that he will. Of course he won’t. But it is only sensible to have a backup plan. If he wins, I’ll be dead.”

“Mom!” The word seemed ripped from Ash.

“Don’t call me that, Ash,” Lillian snapped. “I’ll be dead; we both have to face that. Rob crosses the threshold of Aurimere and takes the town over my dead body. That is the responsibility I inherited from my mother; that is the bargain of our town. Before I surrender Sorry-in-the-Vale, I will die. And I cannot allow the only Lynburns left to be Rob and Rosalind. So you and Jared cannot take part in the battle tomorrow. You have to get out of Sorry-in-the-Vale and gather your resources; then you can come back and crush him.”

She sat down in one of the high-backed gold chairs, crossing her legs and turning her face away from her son. There was another hush among the group, as there had been when they realized that Henry had come alone. It sank in for all of them that Lillian had basically told them that she believed she was going to lose.

Lillian looked around the room. “Where are the others? The Prescott girl and the good-looking one?”

“Baby,” said Rusty, “I’m right here.”

Lillian gave him a horrified look, then bent her gaze on Kami, who said, “Holly and Angela are talking to some of the sorcerers who haven’t chosen a side yet. You told us that we were excluded from your plans, so we made our own.”

Under Lillian’s gaze, Kami wished she had sat on one of the high-backed gold chairs as well, though Lillian’s head would still have been well above hers, and Lillian would still have been able to look down her nose. However, Kami felt she would have had more dignity than she currently did, sitting small and alone, practically lost in a slightly cracked leather sofa.

Jared broke ranks behind Henry and strode over to Kami, crossing the room under her startled gaze. She thought he was coming to sit beside her, but instead he slung himself to the floor and sat at her feet, one arm clasped loose around his drawn-up knee and his head bent toward her. She could have reached out and ruffled his hair.

Lillian looked both taken aback and displeased. Kami was a little taken aback herself, but she supposed it was a gesture aimed at Lillian, and she touched his shoulder lightly in thanks. “If I said that I was ready to hear your plans now . . . ,” Lillian proposed, her face impassive.

“I haven’t been holding back to punish you,” Kami said helplessly. “We’ve been practicing how to fight more effectively against sorcerers. I’ve been trying to find out about Matthew Cooper, and Elinor and Anne Lynburn, because they were able to defend the town once.”

“Against some ordinary king’s pathetic soldiers,” Lillian sneered.

Henry stared at her, as the only one who was unused to Lillian acting as if she lived in the 1700s. Then he looked away, at his own hands, twisting them together against the white stone of the mantelpiece, where flowers and drowning women tangled together in a marble river.

“It was brave of you to come,” Kami told him. “Alone, and for strangers. We all owe you more than we could ever repay.”

“Let’s show Henry to his room,” Ash suggested

Henry looked grateful for the reprieve. They walked toward the door, sweeping him away in their rush.

“You could always come back to our place if you don’t fancy Aurimere,” Rusty suggested.

“That’s okay,” Henry said, giving Rusty a look of relief that there was another guy around that wasn’t a Lynburn. “But, er, thank you. So I gather things aren’t going terribly well?” His green eyes, unexpectedly bright behind his glasses, sought Kami’s.

“Not terribly,” she said. She felt distant, part of her still in the next room with Lillian, remembering her talk with businesslike valor about a last stand. “This is so stupid,” she exclaimed. “We can’t go out there with less than half the amount of sorcerers Rob has and try to face him down in the town square. We need to take Rob and the others by surprise.”

Henry blinked three times in quick succession. Kami looked away from him, let her eyes slide to where they wanted to go and catch on Jared’s face. He was already looking at her.

“Let’s go,” Jared said.

Kami smiled back at him, a current of excitement passing between them.

Ash said heavily, “My mother would never agree.”

They all knew it was true. She was set on her sorcerers’ battle, on a display of strength before the town. They had a better chance with Lillian than without her, and the very few sorcerers they had would follow Lillian’s lead.

“Well,” said Kami, “at the very least, we need to make sure all Lillian’s sorcerers have the advantages we can give them. Holly and Angela are on it, but we need to all be talking to them. We need to give them the bags we made. Ash should take the ladies, because he’s charming.”

Ash looked pleased. Jared raised his eyebrows.

“Are you saying that I’m not a charmer?”

“You are very dear to me, but you have all the savoir faire of a wildebeest,” Kami told him.

“A wildebeest,” Jared repeated.

“A dashingly handsome wildebeest,” Kami assured him. “Now let’s go call on some sorcerers. Bring me a revolution.”

She looked away from him and saw Rusty’s glance from her to Jared, alert for a moment. The Lynburn boys withdrew in opposite directions, while Kami sidled over to Rusty.

“Don’t look at me like you know something,” she said. “You don’t know something.”

“I know many things,” Rusty told her. “I am a very great genius. I’m going to go charm some people too. I may not be a Lynburn, but I am the most charming mofo in town.” He gave her a hug and said, “Take care of yourself, Cambridge,” in an unusually serious way.

For a moment she thought he was warning her about Jared, but then she realized that this could be one of the last times they saw each other. Rusty smoothed a hand down Kami’s hair and she hugged him back, and could not watch as he left. She looked away instead, and caught Henry’s eye.