It wouldn’t be so easy for me. “Ezo, can you help me?”
He looked down to where I held my arms gingerly in front of me, and his eyes widened for the briefest moment before his gaze jumped back to my face. He reached down, taking me by the elbow, but the angle was odd, and he couldn’t get enough leverage to pull me up without jarring my hands. I tried not to cry out, but I did, tears leaking down my face.
Then with a little rustle, Bob started to shake. It shivered until it had worked its way out of the sling on my back, falling to the ground. Then it rolled, knocking against my boots.
Understanding, I swallowed and used my feet to get it in position right at the base of the orrery. “Thank you, Bob.”
I stepped on its handle, and it lifted me while Ezo held on for balance. When Bob had gone to its full two-foot height, Ezo pulled me onto the platform. We overbalanced, and I landed next to him, pain shrieking up my arms. Shaking and nauseous with it, I used my elbows to leverage myself to my feet.
“You’re going to have to tell me this whole story someday,” Ezo said.
Ha. Someday. We would have to survive this, and I very much doubted we would, or that he’d be speaking to me once all was said and done. “Where’s the—”
Behind us, there was a grunt of pain, a yelp, and then a hag’s screech. A half second passed, and then the mist echoed with a hollow thud that sounded sickeningly like a body hitting a wall at speed.
“Firenza!” Ivy shouted.
I tried to inhale, but couldn’t. A thick fog was swirling up from the ground. It swallowed Talsar, who was dodging a crackling ray of energy flung by Auntie Posey. It swallowed Ivy, who danced and jabbed at Auntie Pearl. It roiled at the feet of Granny Maude who stood, all alone, eyes fixed on me. Then, without moving her feet, she began to glide forward. Staring over my head, she said, “Adeline, it’s time to give you what you most desire.”
The world turned inside out.
I stood in a field of white, all alone. Perfect silence wrapped around me. Something was missing, though. Something urgent that still left red trails across my mind.
Pain. I felt no pain. When I looked down, both my hands were there, perfect and whole.
A wisp of mist rose, curling and coalescing into a beautiful silver woman.
“Behold, and learn,” she said in a melodic voice, gesturing around her. “Perfect solitude. No one needs you, you need no one.” She waved, and a shelf of books rose as she had risen, solidifying before my eyes. “Here is all I have learned about magic. Do you know how long I have been alive?”
“Five thousand years, Granny.”
“Five thousand years,” repeated Granny Maude. She smiled, and her teeth were sharp and silver as knives. “It will take you that long to learn it. But you can. I can keep you alive, suspended here while you read. When you emerge, you will have power beyond your dreams. Powers you do not even know to covet, my ambitious girl, because you do not even know they exist. All will be yours.”
Something warm wrapped around each of my biceps, like hands that weren’t there. A voice came from the distance, rough and smooth as water over river stones. “Adi!”
“Ezo?”
The silver woman flashed her teeth. “If you want to know all, you must let them go. They are nothing. A dream of the past. Of the time before your power. We will strike a new deal. Here, you will have magic. Not the power arcane, but great power, nonetheless. You will never be helpless again.”
Memories flashed before my eyes. Things I had not allowed myself to see for fifteen years. My mother’s face. My father’s. The screams, and the smell of blood and burning. Gythan growls. Running, children running so far, so long, in such profound cold. Running and crying until my eyes were dry as my aching lungs.
“Adi!” Ezo again. “What do I do?”
This was a dream, but I wasn’t asleep. It was like the way they spoke to me while I scried. And just as I could when I scried, there had to be a way to push her out. Except . . . I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I looked longingly at those shelves, those books. All she was offering me.
Magic is the only thing that keeps me safe, my own voice whispered.
Sit tight. Ivy’s voice. I won’t let anything happen to you.
Don’t worry, said Firenza. We’ll keep you safe.
“Tell him to put the gear into the orrery,” Granny Maude said. “There is a small door beneath your feet.”
Why did she not just take it from him?
“If it does not go there,” she continued, “he may look elsewhere.”
I stepped away from her. The ghost of pain whispered through my ruined wrists. The chains had to still be there in the real world, even if my hands weren’t, keeping me from bleeding so much I died from it. “You never needed all of them. You only needed Ezo. Ezo and the gear. Why did you make me bring them all?”
Silver Maude shrugged, but the softness in her voice turned brittle. “Mortals are hard to tell apart. Besides, he would not be separated from them. I have watched the world long enough to recognize that.”
She had watched the world. It seemed like most powerful creatures merely watched. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be in the world. Be part of it.
My wrists twinged again. The pain was like a thread connecting me to reality. I grasped it. Slowly, so slowly, I began to follow it back.
Perhaps noticing, Silver Maude waved once more. Arcane symbols flashed into the air. Spells and formulas that spoke of eternal mysteries. I could understand them, if only I had time and someone to guide me. I would never understand this without the hag’s help. “I will teach you,” she said.
I stopped following the thread, simply holding on. I licked my lips and said, “I want you to let them go. Let them go alive, unharmed, and unchanged. Ezo will tell me what to do, and you’ll know how to fix your machine.”
I made certain to be specific. I could ask her to let them go, and she might toss their bodies over her wall, or imprison them for fifty years, or turn them into houseflies and let them fly away.
Outside of this dream, my friends were dying. Because of me.
Silver Maude smiled. “Even if I could allow them to live, by the time you emerge from this place, they will be five thousand years dead.”
Talsar’s voice, What’s the point in having everything if you look up from all those baubles one day and find yourself alone?
Like opening my eyes to the light for the first time, I realized that I didn’t want to be alone.
I jerked on that thread of pain with all my willpower, bringing the agony sharp and hard into focus.
“No!” Granny Maude shrieked. Like a dog on a lead yanked backward, she disappeared from the dream. The world inverted again, and I staggered forward and hit my knees hard against the platform, retching whatever was in my stomach. Granny Maude had fallen into the snow in front of the orrery, blinking at the sky in a daze.
“Adeline!” Ezo pulled me to my feet.
“It’s you, Ezo.” I gasped. “You’re the one she wants. That golden gear, it will complete the machine. They know you’ll know how to fix it.”
Ezo’s eyes went wide, and his lips parted. “I wouldn’t—”
“He will.” Granny Maude pulled herself onto the platform. “He will, because you brought them all, Adeline. Every person in the world he loves is there.” She pointed into the mist, where the muffled sounds of struggle echoed off the village’s unseen broken walls.