“Ifra?” Violet said. “Why are you crying? It’s your fault all this happened.” She let out a broken sob. “Please answer me. Did you kill Erris and Celestina? Ifra! Why? Please. Please take me back.”
“Are you stupid?” He grabbed her arm. “I’m a jinn. I told you. I have to do what my master asks of me. No matter what it is. I’m not a man, I’m a vessel for wishes.”
“B-but… do you have to be so cruel?” Violet started sobbing into her scarf again.
He took a deep breath and stroked the nose of his dear, patient horse. The simple sweetness of animals had always been a comfort to him, even at the worst of times.
“I don’t mean to be cruel,” he said. “No. I’m sorry.”
She sniffed. “Then… please… is Uncle Erris okay?”
He shook his head slowly.
“Is he dead?” Her voice sounded hollow.
“He’s… Well, I guess it depends on whether he was alive to begin with.” Ifra trailed off, knowing it hardly mattered what Erris really was. That dark part of his mind that was no longer his own had taken over more often than not this past day, gathering the townspeople as a distraction, attacking the scarred girl to break the concentration of the woman in the black dress. With his goal so close, he became relentless and cruel. Now that it was over, he was left alone with the consequences.
“I think… Celestina will be all right,” he said. Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure. It was hard to give them names, these people he destroyed.
“Why did the king want you to hurt him?” Violet said, her voice very small. “Before… you said he wanted you to bring him unharmed.”
“Now it’s you he wants. As soon as he found out you were a Tanharrow too, he wanted me to destroy Erris.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I do know there are many people in the fairy lands who want to see a Tanharrow on the throne. They don’t like Luka. There’s a group called the Green Hoods, waiting for you or Erris to return. I presume Luka wants you so he can calm down the people who want to follow a Tanharrow. He wants you to marry his son Belin. Make you queen… control you.”
“I don’t want to become a queen to someone’s king,” Violet said fiercely. “I want to be queen on my own.”
He gripped her arm in what he hoped was a reassuring way. “Maybe you have an opportunity. There are people behind you. People waiting for you. And you’ll have me. If you sit on the fairy throne, I can answer to you.”
She looked curious. Cautious, but he sensed she found him attractive. His heart was racing. If he managed this right… if Violet was on the throne… he might finally gain control of not only his own life, but a kingdom as well.
Running beneath his ambition to be free was a dangerous undercurrent of interest in this girl who could become his secondary master. It was never wise to care for a master.
“How?” she asked.
He briefly explained the nature of his enslavement.
“But I don’t want to marry this Belin,” she said. She shivered a little. The only light they had was the half-full moon reflecting on the snow. Violet, looking tiny and cold, clutched the handful of books she’d been holding on to for dear life even as he swung her onto the horse.
“Think of it not as a marriage, but as a strategic move,” he said. “Like a game you’re trying to win. I’ll help you.”
Her breath came in soft, frosty puffs. “Ifra?”
“Yes.”
“When you attacked us… you kept saying you were sorry. But you didn’t sound sorry.”
“I’m not really myself when I grant wishes. I can’t be. Trust me… there is no pleasure in it. Quite the opposite, in fact; it’s-it’s awful.”
She looked at him for a long moment, and whispered, “I’m sorry I shouted at you when you were crying.”
“No. Don’t be.”
He mounted the horse, putting his warm arm around her again, trying to be protective and comforting. It wasn’t really hard to think of falling for a young woman like Violet. He yearned so deeply for a loving touch with another person, and her own loneliness was so palpable, so easy to understand.
“If we’re going to meet the fairy king,” she said, “I want real clothes. Clothes for a lady, not a girl, so they’ll take me seriously.”
“We can get you some clothes.”
She was quiet, then, and a few minutes later she started to cry quietly into her scarf. She cried herself right to sleep, while he rode on through the night. Jinn could go days without sleep, which was just as well when there was no welcoming bed for miles, but unfortunate when dark thoughts chased his waking mind wherever he went.
Chapter 20
Celestina was in considerable pain when she woke. Without proper care, we could only guess at her injuries. The man who had examined her-I didn’t know if he was a doctor or merely someone with a talent for bonesetting-said she had no broken bones, and she could move her fingers and toes, but she couldn’t do much else. She could only lie on her back, and she couldn’t get out of bed.
I was hardly prepared to take care of anyone.
“I’ll see to her,” Annalie said. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”
“I’m not going to be able to sleep.”
“I know. Just rest.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone to handle all this.”
“We are never really alone.” Annalie smiled just a little. She had always reminded me of the Queen of the Longest Night herself-something about her seemed much older than her years or her smooth skin implied.
I felt very, very alone myself. I went to Erris’s room instead of my own. We’d left his body in the greenhouse room. It had seemed fitting in the moment, to leave him among the green growing things, but now it occurred to me all the plants would probably die without Erris and Violet to tend them. I shuddered at the thought of his clockwork body gathering dust and the plants withering away in the darkness, but I had no intention of opening the door to that room ever again.
The last real conversation we’d had was a quarrel, one where I’d been stubborn. He was right about Hollin. The man had done things I shouldn’t forgive him for, and if I felt like I couldn’t even tell Annalie about our correspondence, it wasn’t proper for it to continue.
I went to the kitchen and fed Hollin’s letters to the woodstove. Then I sobbed for a long time, with the cat wending around me, letting out his own sad cries. I didn’t know if he missed Violet, or if he just sympathized with the situation. I ended up sleeping curled up with him on the rug.
There would be no letters from Hollin anymore, in any case. The next morning, Annalie came down and said we ought to write Karstor about the situation.
“Lean Joe left,” I said. “One of us will have to go to town to deliver the letter.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Exactly.”
Annalie sighed. “Perhaps I can contact him through the spirits.”
“Is there anything you can’t do?”
Her brow furrowed.
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t a good way to word that. I just meant, you’ve really become good at magic.”
“I haven’t been like other people for a long time,” Annalie said. She was looking at her hands, hands so slender and pale that the most pampered lady in Lorinar would envy them. “Karstor says I don’t use magic like trained necromancers. I guess it’s all wrong, how I do it. And really, it isn’t my magic at all. It belongs to the spirits. I just give them a connection to this world.”
“How do you keep the bad spirits out?”
“Oh, I don’t even think of it like that. ‘Bad’ spirits. There are angry spirits, but not bad ones. I guess I just know how to deal with them from all my years when they were with me, whether I wanted them to be or not.”
“Do you miss them? Being with you all the time?”
She glanced at me. “Sometimes I do. Yes. I wasn’t really sure I wanted Karstor to lift the curse at all.”