was accustomed to lighting. But it looked no different and burned just as equably; the lantern hanging beside the entrance to the rock-hewn steps accepted its fire.
The little boat with its mast and furled sail was moored as always in the dark, slow water beneath Aislinn House. She studied it a moment. The water that welled up among the stones and ran down to the sea would carry it, but only as far as the grate running across the passage into the wood. But, she thought stubbornly. You are a boat. You are meant to follow water, not sit on it in perpetual gloom. Someone made you to go out into the world. You cannot pass beyond the grate unless it opens for you. So. It must open somehow. How?
On the boat a little flick just on the edge of the lantern light, quick and soundless as an eye blink, made her breath catch. She lifted the lantern higher, trying to see what had startled her. There was a very human murmur from the air. Then a figure took shape, sitting in the boat, darkly cloaked from hood to heel, holding a book open. A page had turned, she realized. And then she recognized the book.
She raised the lantern abruptly, recognized the face within the hood.
“Ridley,” she whispered.
He looked astonished. “How did you see me when I was invisible?”
“I didn’t. I saw the book.”
He grunted, murmured puzzledly, “I thought it was invisible as well. Perhaps it has a mind of its own. What are you doing down here? It’s not time—”
“For what?” she asked evenly. “Time for me to leave the lantern on the prow of the boat and go away again so that someone else can come and put out the light and hang the lantern back on its hook by the entrance so that I can come back again tomorrow and light it and leave it on the prow of the boat so that someone—Did you lock the door to the crows’ tower?”
He thought about that; his face, stubbled and smudged with shadows, grew suddenly rueful. “I did. When I passed it earlier to get this book. I didn’t want them attacking me again. I was going to return the book and unlock the door before you got there. But I lost myself in this book...” Something in her still, blanched face made his voice trail away. He rose quickly. “I’ll unlock it now. It’s a simple spell. There’s time.”
“Is there?” She shook her head, her eyes glazed with unshed tears. “Is there, Ridley Dow? You made me step beyond the ritual. I can’t go backward. I can’t stop thinking what I think, or wanting what I want. I think the crows are something more than crows, and what they want most is not their breakfast. I think the boat goes nowhere after I put the lantern in it. How can it? It is chained. Trapped by the grate. I want to know why. I want to know what you see in the book.”
Gazing at her, he tried to say something, gave it up. He held out his hand. “Come and see.”
She took it, stepped into the gently rocking boat and sat down beside him. The thick, heavy book, whose blank pages she had turned, one after another, every day since she could walk, had, in Ridley’s hands, finally begun to speak.
It said colors; it said wonders, marvels drawn with ink and painted with such hues that melted into life, spilling across every page like a tide of ancient, forgotten treasure. There were words among the images, each letter a tiny work of art, each word, extravagantly decorated and totally incomprehensible.
“I think it’s a spell book of some kind,” Ridley said. “Maybe poetry as well. I’m not sure. It’s all in a secret, or perhaps an ancient, language. But the book itself was spellbound, probably by Nemos Moore. That’s why you saw only blank pages.”
Ysabo touched a bird the color of dawn, perched among the golden leaves of an immense tree.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “All this time I never saw it. I turned empty page after empty page, never knowing... Why, Ridley?” She stared at him, her eyes wide, burning again, as though he might have an answer to her life. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he answered softly. He turned a page, looking for answers there, maybe, then another. And then she stopped him, touching something familiar: a feast in a great hall, tables filled with knights and ladies, bright banners hanging above their heads. “Is that us?” she wondered. But no: the hall doors were open to reveal a meadow full of wildflowers, birds flying across a cloudless sky. And a crowned figure sat at the center of the table, an old man with hair like gray tree moss beside her. She turned another page, lingered there again, gazing at the dark water, sky the color of silver, trees loosing their last leaves. Upon a tiny island in the middle of the water, a silver shield lay like something lost, a torn pennant beside it.
“I know this,” she whispered. “Why do I know it?”
“How could you?” Ridley asked with wonder. She lifted her eyes, looked at him, but saw Maeve and Aveline instead, embroidering the air with memories as they sewed.
“It’s a place they described, Maeve and Aveline. As though they’d been there.”
“How could they have?”
“I don’t know.” She turned another page, her fingers trembling. “I don’t know. Here.” She stopped at another image, of huge, worn stones in a wild wood, ancient trees around them tangled together like brambles. Queen Hydria was there, too, with an entourage of knights and nobles, and the strange old man in his long robe. “It was a place full of magic, Maeve said.” Her voice shook. “She said she could feel it.”
“But how?” Ridley’s own voice vanished for a moment. “How could they have left this house?”
“I don’t know, Ridley. When we sew together in the mornings, they talk about other times, other places, as though they remember them. As though they had other lives beyond Aislinn House. Or in this book, somehow ... But if they are part of the ritual, they must have been born here, like I was.”
Ridley’s voice returned abruptly. “Can you ask them?”
“They wouldn’t answer anything. They would only be furious with me for taking the book out of the tower, disrupting the ritual. That’s all they would see. Not the strangeness of their lives, their memories, but the ritual.”
“They may know who made the book.”
“Never ask. That’s what they have told me all my life. They don’t answer even if they know.”
Ridley was silent, his eyes on the painted stones, his mind elsewhere, Ysabo guessed. He said finally, “Princess Ysabo, is there a place you can stay safe and out of sight in this house while I work?”
“I don’t know where to go to be safe,” she answered, taking a bleak look at her life. “Can you raise the grate in the river at the wall, so that I could leave Aislinn House in this boat? I could wait for you beside the sea. The knights and the crows might not find me there.”
“I doubt that you would find the sea through those woods,” Ridley said grimly. “They’re part of the magic. When the knights leave the house at midday, where do they really go? I’ve watched them. Wherever they go, it’s into a different wood. Or a different time. They vanish the moment they ride away from the house.”
She stared at him, chilled. “Then there truly is no way out of this house?”
“Unless you go through the stillroom pantry door into Emma’s world. But I have no idea what would happen to you, even if you could. From this side, that door might just as easily open to nowhere as well.”
She was silent, her thoughts threading their way through the maze of her life, coming up again and again against solid walls, locked doors, passages that spiraled endlessly and went nowhere. “Well, then,” she whispered. “Well, then, Ridley Dow, we must find our own way out. You must undo what Nemos Moore did. You must unbind the spell.”
“Yes.”
“But what—Where do we begin?”
He was gazing at her, his lips parted, his eyes invisible behind reflections of light in his lenses. “You’re sure,” he said finally. “I could unlock the tower door, you could feed the crows, you could wait for me safely within your life.”
She shook her head wearily, looking down at the shadowy stream flowing silently out, away, into. “I don’t want to pretend anymore. Not even to the crows. Where should we go from here?”
“That bell,” he said slowly, “has enough power in it to disturb perfectly comfortable lives as far away as Landringham. It is the single strangest, oldest, and most consistent link between two worlds. I want to find it. Do you have any idea where it is?”
“No.”
“Who rings it?”
“No,” she said again. “I never wondered about it. It’s part of the ritual, part of our lives, a piece of the pattern of someone’s day. Light this candle, lock that door, ring this bell.”
