I could not give them the bracelet Bee had given me. Beyond the clothes I was wearing, I possessed only one other object: the locket in whose heart nestled a tiny portrait of my father. But Daniel Hassi Barahal was not my father. So what would I be giving up by giving it to her? Only my hopes and dreams.
I slipped the chain over my head and handed the silver locket to the fair one. She popped the clasp and squinted at the portrait in the dim light, her fingers tracing the fine silverwork and the chased filigree that decorated the back.
Her frown was soft in the shadows, and for an instant she looked far older than her tender years. “Not what I expected.”
Her words made me shiver, like a memory of the eru’s greeting, but instead of explaining herself, she handed the locket to the dark one, who examined it with a jeweler’s precise measure.
“Done,” she said with a nod. She dropped the chain over her neck and pressed the locket down beneath the loose wool jacket that was buttoned up to her neck.
With no further speech, they skated along the polished wood floor in their soft indoor slippers. I took in a breath for courage and hurried after them. The dark girl with her long legs outpaced her fair cousin and slid to a halt before the heavy door. She bent down by the elaborate lock with a smile that reminded me of Bee’s most mischievous expression. She seemed to be whispering to the bat’s head that adorned the upper part of the lock. The fair one stationed herself at the wall to keep watch.
Was that a glamor shivering in the air, briefly seen as a net of shadow and light? Then it was gone. She slid the crossbar free and tugged open the door, and I slipped outside onto a vestibule and thence out through another door—this one unlatched—into a cold so sere that my lips went numb. I peered cautiously over a stately manicured wood composed of pine and spruce shouldering skyward beneath gray clouds. Bundled in quilted coats ornamented with brightly colored belts, soldiers ran through the trees; their heads were wrapped in cloth against the cold, only their eyes visible beneath red-brimmed hats like so many red-capped finches.
The woods were closed to me. I could not go back into the house. I hugged the wall, became the wall in its dressed smoothness, and ran in the other direction. I had to do what they would not expect me to do: I raced for the grand escalade. If I were bold, I might conceal myself by walking out on the same carriage road I had come in. I could become the pale graveled stone that paved the road. Either no one would see me, or the mansa and his djeli would see right through my pathetic veil and then I would be dead.
At the corner where the wing met the facade, my feet crunched in a spray of gravel. I halted to steady my breath and dig deep for the glamor. All now depended on my ability to veil myself with a glamor.
A flare of complicated emotion burned through me. Who was I, if not the eldest daughter of the Adurnam Hassi Barahal house? Why could I hide myself, listen, and see down chains of magic? Why had my mother told me to keep it a secret? Why had an eru called me “cousin”? Had Aunt and Uncle devised the scheme to sacrifice me in place of Bee? Had Daniel Hassi Barahal and Tara Bell been in on the cheat all along? Was the story that they were my loving mother and father an invented fiction that I had swallowed whole? Was I really an unwanted, useless, and expendable orphan plucked from the streets?
Wouldn’t it be easier to be dead than alone? Yet my heart beat too strongly to give up. What I felt was not precisely anger, nor was it blinding grief. It was something deeper, and more ancient, as determined as rock and as rooted as the great trees whose spirits animate the forest.
I would not die for their convenience.
White spun in the air. It had begun to snow. I could be snow. I drifted with the flakes onto the graveled court spreading like a pool beyond the granite escalade. No one would expect such a bold ploy. In front of the eyes of watching soldiers, I paced the measure of lazy snow, and they did not see me.
But someone else did.
Hooves made a crackling din as a carriage rolled around the curve of the drive. The coachman dragged the horses to a stop a stone’s throw from me. The footman leaped down from the back and flung open the carriage door without lowering the steps.
From away behind the kitchen wing, dogs yipped and set up barking, released to the hunt. What was concealed to their sight they might track with their keen noses. Against dogs, I had no chance.
The eru looked at me, captured my gaze. “The bonds of kinship demand I aid you, if I can.”
The coachman did not look at me—his gaze gathered in the soldiers and servants crowding expectantly on the escalade, some of whom were staring curiously at the carriage and others lifting their gazes in search of the approaching dogs—but the invitation was clear.
