her hair matched the dress, and the whole thing was topped off by a double-breasted coat with puffed sleeves and white piping.
“When will you put your hair up and your skirts down?” I asked her as we trudged through fallen leaves. The last snow had melted, but the leaves were wet.
“Oh. Should I? What age do girls usually?”
“Fourteen?”
“I’m fifteen! Celestina never told me.”
“Well, it’s no use if you’re in bed all the time anyway, but maybe now you should.”
She nodded. “So I should have all new clothes. But it should have been last year. I wasn’t sick all last year. Is it too late to go to town and get new clothes? We really should go to the city even. That’s where these clothes came from. Papa took me to the city.”
“It’s certainly too late to get clothes now. And we can’t take you to the city! Just ask your father when he gets back, I suppose.”
She sighed heavily. “When will I ever get to do anything?”
“I don’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “I think it’s ridiculous that you can’t go anywhere and everyone forgets who you are. How are you supposed to get on in the world like that?”
“You came from some really faraway country, right, Nimira?”
“Yes.”
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen. Well, almost fourteen.”
“Were you scared?”
“Well, I was, but… I don’t know. Once you commit to something, you just manage through each moment. And nothing truly awful happened. The voyage over was uneventful. I found work right away, just not very good work. The worst thing wasn’t something terrible, it was the lack of anything wonderful.”
Violet sucked in her breath. “What about Erris?” she asked.
“Erris? I met him much later.”
“Yes, I know, I just…” She tugged on one of her hair bows. “You fell in love with him, right?”
“I-I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not polite to be so blunt, you know.”
“I’m not trying to be polite,” Violet said. “I want to know what it’s like to be in love. I want a girl to talk to, and Celestina is no help. She says things like, ‘Oh, you don’t need to know about that, you can worry about that later.’” She mimicked a bossy tone.
Violet must be desperate if she wanted to confide in me. I hadn’t even been nice to her, and she wanted to talk to me about love? But I wasn’t sure how to talk to her about it. I wasn’t even sure what I felt anymore. What had I ever felt? My feelings for Erris had been so intense when I was trying to save him, but they had been replaced as of late by more of a guilty desperation, and I wasn’t about to tell Violet that.
We had reached the bluff, one of my favorite places on the grounds. A rocky promontory jetted into the sea, within distant view of the shore where we took walks and gathered seaweed and shells. From here, I could see dozens of islands and, on a clear day, which this was not, even the Cernan Light, striped like a black-and-white candy cane.
The bluff was marked by the burned husk of what might once have been a two- or three-room structure. Most of the chimney still stood, but otherwise it was just the foundation with some charred wood pieces jutting from it. Celestina had told me it was an old hunting lodge, but ruins held a certain fascination for me, even perfectly ordinary ones.
“Oh, I forgot about the haunted cabin!” Violet said, poking the ruins with her toe.
“Is it haunted? Celestina said it was nothing.”
“No,” Violet said, sounding rather displeased about it. “I just used to pretend it was. I didn’t have anyone to play with, so I was always wishing things were haunted, and they never were. Well, there it is.” She pointed to a rock formation that I had never paid much attention to, a large, somewhat flat rock stacked on two smaller rocks.
“That’s your mother’s grave? Those rocks?”
Violet nodded. She went to the rocks and leaned her head against them. “It’s a fairy grave.”
I shivered. “Let’s not talk about it,” I said. I didn’t want to think of Erris’s body buried under stones like these.
“Why not?” Violet said. “I’m not sad. I don’t remember her.” She spoke almost too emphatically to be believed.
“Aren’t you sad you don’t remember her?”
“Well… I do miss her. It’s just that she feels like a story. Actually, worse. I think I know the mother in the Poppenpuffer Family books better than her. I guess everything would be different if she were still alive. Papa wouldn’t have gone to work for the Queen of the Longest Night.” She turned to me. “But don’t feel sorry for me or anything.”
“I don’t,” I said, although, of course, I did, a bit.
It was windy on the bluff, carrying sounds away from us, but we were both suddenly alert to hoof-falls, coming from the forest. Had something happened? I couldn’t imagine Celestina would take a horse if she needed to find us, unless it was urgent.
Violet and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, silently asking the other if we should run. What if it was those nasty boys from the shop?
Violet grabbed my sleeve. “Let’s hide behind Mother’s grave.”
The stones were big enough to conceal us from view of the forest, but terribly exposed on every other side. I knelt with her, but I was restless, my hands gathering small rocks I could throw at the face of an attacker. At least I was wearing my trousers.
I heard the horse step from the woods. It came closer, and closer, until it was sniffing the gravestones on the other side. Hiding became an almost unbearable tension, and it seemed unlikely the horse or rider would not find us at any moment, so I stood up, one hand full of rocks.
For a moment, I was speechless. Violet stood alongside me, equally speechless. The horse was unlike any I had seen-strong but delicate, like a stylized horse in a painting, with a pure white coat and curious, too-intelligent eyes.
But its rider was even more stunning, with skin like honey and eyes keen as a tiger, his straight black hair caught in a ponytail that stirred with the wind. He was not dressed like anyone from Lorinar; he wore a blue shirt that fastened with a sash, with an open neck and bare arms, and boots made from brown hide stitched with red thread.
And in his ears, gold hoops. And at his wrists, golden cuffs like a second skin.
It didn’t seem possible, but ancient tales were stirring in my mind, tales that traveled the world like spices and cloth, tales of imprisoned people with great power, the power to dissolve into smoke, the power to grant a heart’s desire, creatures recognizable by their golden cuffs of bondage.
Violet took hold of my sleeve again, and I met those golden eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked. My voice stayed steady.
“I was sent by the fairy king.”
The fairy king. He had found us. Celestina said he couldn’t harm Violet, and I prayed that was true, but Erris…
How quickly I had relaxed. I had started to delude myself that the fairy king wouldn’t bother with us, and I didn’t want to remember how this fear felt, knowing I must do and say just the right thing to save us. But here it was, like a fist inside me, squeezing on my lungs.
“The fairy king?” Violet asked. I squeezed her hand as a signal that she should let me do the talking. Clearly, the signal was missed. “Well, don’t bother. You can’t hurt me. You can’t lay a finger on me.”
“Who are you?” the jinn asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why would I want to hurt you?”
Violet shied back, apparently realizing rather belatedly that she’d said too much.
