A pale blue light flickered across the elder Miss Davenport’s face, and her eyes went glassy, and she broke. “Into the woods,” she said, the words forcing themselves from her lips. She seemed unable to look away from Jane’s gaze. “She just wanted to look at the foxgloves.…”
Jane dropped the girl’s arms and flung herself past the foxgloves edging the wood, under branches, through brambles. Dimly she was aware of Mr. Rochart wresting himself away from the women to follow. The rage was white hot all through her, making it hard to think, hard to run without numb feet stumbling. This was no good; she would be as useless as the Misses Davenport if she could not bring herself back to reason.
There was a natural clearing a few yards in and Jane stopped, willing her rage to clear. The water imagery was useless in the face of that snapped bolt of rage—she could not think of anything except her anger at the girl who had done nothing more than looked the other way, not been on guard. Her rage frightened her, as well as that strange moment when it was almost as if she had bent the girl to her will.
The rage might not go, but she would not let it stop her from finding her little girl. Through the hot rage she turned around in the clearing. “Dorie?” she shouted. “Dorie?” There was no answering sound.
The already obscured view of Mr. Rochart’s lawn was the only bright spot in the trees around her; on all other sides the forest was green-black and dim. Well past the last ray of sunlight. Jane’s eyes flicked to rustles of leaves, small brown birds, a vole. At any moment there might be blue light slipping through the trees, back from a five-year absence to find her, to find Dorie. Blue, limning the silver birch, the parasitic mistletoe. Blue that came sharp and fast and hot, blue that whip-cracked your life like lightning striking a strong chestnut tree, tearing it in half.…
“Have you seen any trace of her?” His breath came fast.
Jane nearly jumped out of her boots. “No,” she said. The hot orange was giving way to fear. Anger and fright could make her do foolish things. She steeled herself, trying to find her even keel. “Should we split up?”
“Not a chance,” said Edward, and his hand clamped down on her wrist. “Stay with me.”
He ducked under a low-hanging branch and set off carefully but purposefully, as if following a trail only he could see. Several times he lifted his head, as if scenting the air or listening—something using a sense other than sight. Though he dropped her arm so they could navigate the narrow trail, Jane stayed close on his heels, trying to keep the ends of her veil out of the grip of brambles and twigs.
A blue light flashed in the clearing.
“There, over there!” cried Jane, and she took his arm as if she could physically propel him to his daughter’s side. She crashed past him, tugging, because for a moment he just stood there with stricken eyes.
“The Queen,” Edward said, and his amber eyes were black and wild.
She tugged on his sleeve and slowly he moved again, running after her to where the blue light had been.
“Nothing,” she said, looking at the empty clearing. “Nothing,” and suddenly she whirled, thoughts flying—“What do you know about this forest? You grew up here. You were out here last week, when I found you. Where would the fey likely be?” Even before the Great War, when the fey had been half-made-up tales, still there had been signs. Rings where they gathered, clearings where they were said to bask, trees they swarmed in. All the spots that when you were five you believed might truly be fey, and not just fireflies.
But he shook his head, and that dazed expression was in his eyes. “I didn’t find what I sought,” he said. “I don’t think. I have been losing time. There are large gaps, just like the time before that, the long time.…”
Jane tugged on his sleeve. “Stay with me,” she said fiercely.
He willed himself back to the present with a great effort. Strain showed around the corners of his eyes. “The forest has changed,” he said hoarsely. “When I knew it as a child, it wasn’t evil. You could still walk there by day, at least. It wasn’t a habitat.” He looked around, palms spread out as if trying to determine where he was by feeling the air around him. “But … closer to the creek, I think. If we walk…” His hands groped through the air as if questing for that spot. “If we walk through here…”
Edward pushed through an unlikely looking pair of bushes and Jane followed on his heels. They spilled out into another clearing—the forest seemed to be nothing but round clearings linked by dense brush, which sent shivers down her spine. That was not natural growth, nor human-made—no, that was all fey.
Habitat, as Edward had said.
Edward felt forward with his hands, palms outward. “Most peculiar,” he muttered to himself. “I can almost feel the way with my hands.… This way or this way.…”
“Is that—what is that?” She lunged for a scrap of blue just past Edward, down the first “this way.” Caught her toe in the fork of a fallen branch, went flying. Her veil caught and snicked tight around her throat and she pushed breathlessly, uselessly at it, tried to extricate herself from the wild and weaving branches that framed the clearing. Spots danced in front of her sight, silver and blue.
Then strong hands were around her waist, hauling her upward, untangling her veil from the bush, and as they touched her she suddenly thought, He loves me, and in the next instant didn’t know why she thought she knew it. Once standing, his hands did not linger, but took the blue scrap of cloth from her to study.
“It’s hers,” Jane managed, between catching her breath, trying not to look sideways at this man who had hauled her up so effortlessly. Not effortlessly in the sense of strength, though he was strong, but in the sense that he could touch her waist and recover, that it should so clearly not bother him when she could still feel the imprint of his fingers on her ribs.
How could she think that he loved her? She knew full well he did not think of her at all. How could he, when he’d never even seen her face? He had no object to fasten on—she could only ever be a cipher to him, a shadowy governess form hidden behind cotton veils, behind an iron mask.
“This way,” he said, and hurried past the bush, squeezing his lanky figure past it into the next open space, hands feeling forward in that strange testing, questing motion, as if they were drawn by a magnet.
She was following him, and then she caught something out of the corner of her eye and she went that way, plowing through black branches that tore at her hands and dress and veil, pushing through leaves coated in sticky sap and spiderwebs, twigs with thorns and bark that raked her ankles and elbows. Her veil caught and pulled, but it had been unwound in the first tumble, and now it ripped free. Her hat came completely off and she felt air against her cheek, but she did not stop.
In the clearing ahead—
“Dorie!” shouted Jane, and then a blue-orange light blinded her.
Jane’s cheek flamed hot and she stumbled, momentarily sightless. As she fell, groping for purchase, she wondered wildly if perhaps there were no fey in the woods at all. Perhaps she had misjudged the limits of Dorie’s abilities, perhaps—and her heart raced as she hit the ground, still waiting for the world to come back into focus—perhaps giving Dorie permission to work on her skills had changed her, developed her beyond their ability to control.
That exploded doll. Shards of porcelain.
Dorie’s stricken face.
Perhaps Jane had unwittingly unleashed a monster out of this little girl.
Vision was returning slowly, like the old fey cameras did, their blue-and-white image slowly revealing itself on the page. Dorie, she only saw Dorie, raising her hands against the sky.
Jane rubbed her eyes, strained them trying to see in more detail than shades of twilight blue. Still Dorie, only Dorie …