I couldn’t summon any fire myself. I was too shaken with anticipation. Was Erris here? I couldn’t see until Ifra came down, and then…
Erris was lying on the ground, mere inches from my feet. It was absolutely my Erris, through and through, even dressed much as I had first seen him, with stockings and breeches and heeled shoes like someone in an old book. He was pale and dirty and I dropped to my knees and started to shake him.
“Erris! Wake up! How do we get him to wake up?”
“I don’t know!” Belin said. “I always heard people wake up from a death sleep eventually.”
“Eventually!” I cried. “Well, what if this isn’t eventually?”
“There are skeletons in here!” Violet shrieked, once Ifra had helped her down. “Let’s bring him out!”
I couldn’t believe I was really looking at Erris. It was as magical and terrifying as the moment when I’d freed him from being trapped at the piano. I put my hand on his chest and I could feel skin and muscle and bone there; I could feel him breathing. I knew that now, of all moments, I needed to keep it together, just a little longer, but I couldn’t even seem to care that Belin and Violet and Ifra were there. My jaw was trembling, so close to tears. I wanted to touch him, kiss him, whisper in his ear.
“I can wake him,” I said. “Please, I know I can. Just leave me alone for a moment. Please.”
“In the dark with the skeletons?” Violet said.
“Yes.”
“Hurry,” Belin ordered, as if he had any better ideas. Erris was right, these Graweldins were an irritating lot. They all climbed back out, and I blocked out the sound of them talking above me. I blocked out everything except Erris, there before me. I pressed my forehead to his, pressed my hand to his heart, and felt not the tick of clockwork, but the beating of a heart.
“Erris,” I whispered through tears, running my fingers along his soft hair, brushing away thirty years of dust. “Wake up. Please wake up. This is how fairy tales end.” I kissed his lips-dry with disuse, but alive, so alive-and I flooded him with all the warm magic I could summon.
The lips parted, with a soft crack just audible in the silence. A hand slowly lifted to touch my face.
“Nim?” he croaked, and then he coughed a cloud of dust into my face, which was not very much like a fairy tale at all, but I didn’t even flinch. “Am-am I dead?”
“Oh, no. No. It’s just dark. We’re in the palace of Telmirra-”
“In the catacombs… under the Hall of Oak and Ash?” he whispered. His hands moved to my neck and my shoulders and then back to my hair, and he clutched me close. “But I must be dreaming. How did you get here?”
“I’ll explain later. King Belin wants to speak to you.”
“Wait a moment, wait a moment.” He held me close.
And then he started to cry.
And I started to cry too.
We’d both tried so many times not to cry, and now it was okay. It was okay.
“You did it,” he said. “You saved me.”
“I had help.”
“But it was you. And you know it. You needed help; it was an impossible task, but
I touched his cheek, put my face close. “Kiss me.”
“Kiss you now? No, not yet. I haven’t cleaned my teeth in years and it’s really-Let’s just wait.”
I laughed, with a catch in it, and I kissed him anyway, although not like I’d kiss him later.
At least, once we were safe.
Above us, I heard some muffled shouting, the sudden commotion of an opening door. More shouting.
I helped Erris struggle to his feet on stiff limbs before Prince Tamin could find us.
TELMIRRA
The door burst open, and there was Tamin with fury in his eyes, and his men behind him, two of them holding a woman dressed in black, the other two holding crossbows. They had Annalie, Ifra realized, after a moment of connection. She looked so serene that the men kept jostling her as if trying to get a reaction.
“What are you doing?” Tamin hissed. “Do you want to put our entire kingdom in jeopardy?”
“I want to free Erris,” Belin said.
“But what does he know? How is he fit to be king? Are you so desperate to go against me that you’re willing to let him have the throne?”
“Tamin, we can’t do this,” Belin said. “We’re making the trees sick. Father did this to us, decades ago, and it hasn’t made us stronger. Only weaker. I agree, Erris may not be fit to rule now. But we could help him.”
“Oh, well, I see. You’re going to make a hero out of yourself now? Somehow I don’t think you intended to bring Ilsin and me along. I mean, you’ve got your betrothed! She is a Tanharrow! A rightful heir! She would have fixed it all with the old magic and you would have been the one looking to the future, so why bring Erris into it at all? I just don’t understand. I don’t think you’re really doing this for any noble purpose; you’re doing it to spite me.”
“Maybe I am,” Belin said. “In part.” He glanced at Ifra. “But the jinn… he asked me what sort of king I wanted to be. He told me I could be great ruler. And I thought then, that I would like to be that sort of ruler. But I can’t. None of us can. Because of this.”
As Belin spoke, Erris Tanharrow himself appeared, crawling rather shakily out of the catacombs. He looked like someone recovering from a bad bout of influenza, all pale and wasted, but he was up and alive, and even Belin looked a little startled.
Ifra seemed to sense the danger before he saw it; he looked at Tamin and saw the shock and anger in his eyes, saw his fingers gesture an order, saw the crossbow. He dived to cover Erris, taking the bolt in his side, gasping with pain, unable to cry out.
“Ifra!” Violet screamed.
But it took more than that to kill a jinn. Jinn couldn’t even take their own lives with ease-not that Ifra had tried. But he knew poison, knives to the gut, hanging ropes, and even fire were all useless. The curse of a jinn was not death, but to live at almost any cost.
“Ifra, kill Tamin,
Yes… that was the curse. Living at any cost, a life that was not his own. The wish roared through him, drowning his sense, overwhelming right and wrong and everything but a sudden surge of energy that made him spring to his feet and sweep his arm toward Tamin. Another crossbow struck Ifra and he hardly noticed. The Green Hoods pushed through the doors; he saw Keyelle’s familiar face, but it didn’t matter. Tamin’s body flew into the air, slammed against a tree with force, and Ifra felt the crack of his bones and the crush of organs. He had had to break Erris, and now he had to kill Tamin. There was no choice.
Tamin’s body slumped to the ground. Most lives were so fragile.
Ifra dropped to his knees, buried his face, and wept soundlessly. He’d never killed before. He’d done everything to get to know Belin, talk to him, convince him to choose a noble path. He didn’t like Tamin, of course, but what did that matter? Now he’d never wipe the sight from his eyes, never shake the feeling from his limbs of that power overcoming him. Why did he have so much power, even now, even without three wishes? It wasn’t fair. He didn’t want it.
The commotion in the room died down quickly. With Tamin gone, and the Green Hoods there, Tamin’s men didn’t fight back.
Violet’s hands, small and cool, were touching Ifra’s shoulder, his head, then gently probing wounds he barely felt. “Ifra. Ifra.”
Violet couldn’t console him either.
“Ifra, it had to be done,” Belin said.
Violet sprung to her feet. Ifra slowly stood behind her. “It had to be done?” she cried. “What do you mean, ‘it had to be done’? Then why didn’t you do it? You’re a coward, an awful coward, to ask somebody else to kill your
