The road to the gloomy castle plunged into a deep ravine and then climbed back up the steep, rocky ascent. As soon as I stepped into the abyss called Coldclough, I felt a deathly chill travel from the soles of my feet up my spine and understood why the place had been so named. Strangely, though, the snow that had fallen last night and blanketed the surrounding countryside did not cover the ravine. It had either melted or—I felt with a queasy certainty—dissolved in midair, as if even the snow refused to touch this tainted ground. Certainly nothing grew from the black rocky soil on either side of the cobblestone path. The land looked as if it had been blasted by an atomic bomb. No bird or animal stirred through the wasteland. The only sounds were the footsteps of the villagers following me, but even those were muffled. Halfway down, I was seized by the fear that the entire population of Ballydoon had been swallowed by the gaping mouth of the ravine and I had been left alone.
I spun around and saw that William and the other men had spread their plaid over the crowd to shield them from the unnatural cold. William stepped toward me to envelop me in the tartan mantle, but I held up my hand to stop him and shook my head. Before I faced Endymion, I had to know all I could about the nephilim, and I understood now, as I turned and continued walking into the gorge, that this place held the key to who they were. The cold told a story. It was the cold of expulsion, of being cast out. It was the cold a baby would feel left naked on a mountaintop to die. It was the cold a lover would feel seeing love die in a beloved’s eyes. It was the cold I’d felt seeing Bill die. When I reached the bottom of the ravine, my teeth were chattering. The ground was covered with blackened and twisted vines. I knelt and touched one and found it was hard, cold stone. As I stared at them, I realized that the petrified vines had once been honeysuckle vines, like those that grew behind my house in Fairwick, surrounding the door to Faerie.
There had once been a door to Faerie here.
I wrapped my hand around the petrified vine and closed my eyes, searching for a remnant of the connection to Faerie but finding none. This door hadn’t just been shut, it had been blasted out of existence, destroyed with a ravaging anger. Images flitted through my brain of beautiful golden creatures—elves—who came through the door and fell in love with humans. But when they lay with human women, the children they produced were horrid leathery-skinned monsters with distorted faces and bat’s wings and long claws. The elves took their disgust for their offspring out on the women, destroying whole villages for sport and then abandoning the monsters they had sired. They tried to return to Faerie but were cast out for the crimes they had committed against humans. Trapped, the elves were attacked by their own children, who hated them for making them feel like monsters. The last elf left shed a tear that encompassed all the grief and shame and regret of his entire race—and that tear turned to stone as the door to Faerie was obliterated. The stone was entrusted to a fairy—a doorkeeper fairy— because it was the only weapon that could destroy the nephilim, as they now called themselves. But even a fairy couldn’t control the power of the stone unless it was contained. The fey crafted a receptacle made of two linked hearts to corral its power, but then the doorkeeper fairy split the brooch in half to protect the human she had fallen in love with. When she faced the nephilim again, she could not use the stone’s power, and the nephilim took it away from her.
That was the stone that Endymion Endicott wore and that I would have to face and seize. The weight of it was so heavy on me that I thought I might not be able to stand up—but then one more vision flickered though my brain and I saw what I must do. I rose slowly to my feet. I was cold all the way through now, down to the bone, but it was the steely cold of resolve. Without looking back, I started climbing toward the castle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The castle was actually a ruin. Fire-blackened walls jutted like broken teeth from the blasted rock. Fragments of statues lay in heaps about the walls, as if they had been pitched from the battlements and they were the petrified remains of the last invading army. The drawbridge was lowered, the portcullis raised, the doors wide open. I walked through into a wide courtyard lit by flickering torches. An enormous pyre stood at the center of the courtyard. Three women were tied to the stake. I recognized Nan and Una and assumed the third woman was Mordag. In front of the pyre, a long scaffold had been erected. More than a dozen more women stood on it, with ropes around their necks. Three cloaked witch hunters stood in front of the scaffold, their faces concealed by beaked masks. The firelight caught a glimmer at the throat of the middle figure. I felt the chill of the angel stone from across the courtyard.
He strode toward me, crossing the space in less time than should have been possible. I heard the flutter of wings behind him and saw their shadows loom on the walls behind the torches. When he was a few feet away he stopped abruptly, the eyes behind the mask riveted on the Luckenbooth brooch. I touched my hand to it to reassure myself it was firmly pinned to my cloak. A spark of static electricity flew off it toward the angel stone. The nephilim tilted his head, like a crow considering a tasty bit of carrion.
“Ah,” Endymion crooned, with a smile that set my teeth on edge because he wasn’t smiling at me. He was smiling at the villagers behind me. “I see you’ve brought me another witch.”
“They haven’t brought me,” I said. “They’ve come with me to save their women and banish you from their village.”
Endymion turned his smile on me. “Are you sure, witch? I promised them that if they delivered you to me, I would spare the rest of their womenfolk. And they have delivered you.”
I began to tell him he was wrong, but then I recalled how the villagers had waited for me to pass their houses and fallen into step behind me. I had thought they were coming to fight the nephilim, but did I really know that they weren’t bringing me as a sacrifice?
I turned to face them. William stood closest to me. He moved toward me, but a woman took a step forward and grabbed his arm. I recognized Jeannie.
“Don’t you see,” she cried. “William, you’ve been enchanted by her. Once she’s burnt at the stake, you’ll be free!”
William shook off Jeannie and faced the crowd, enraged. “You fools!” he shouted. “Do ye think these are men who will honor their word? These are monsters. And how do you think they became monsters? By betraying their own and feeding off the betrayal of others!”
Had they? Had William picked something up in the ravine that I had missed?
I turned back to Endymion, and before his gloating smile could fade I reached out and laid my fingers on the angel stone, reciting as I did a spell I’d learned from Wheelock to ward off regret and grief.
“And do you believe you are any different, witch?” Endymion sneered. “Wouldn’t you sacrifice this whole village for your beloved? And why not? They have turned on you. Sacrifice them, and I will make the Fairy Queen grant you and William safe passage through Faerie.”
“You can do that?” The words were out of my mouth before I realized that just asking the question meant I wanted to do it. He smiled, and the angel stone grew warmer under my hand.
“Of course. Every seven years we demand a tithe from the fey in exchange for not slaughtering all the fey in this world. But this year the Fairy Queen planned to renege on our deal and keep William for herself.”
“But you took Mordag
“Ah, she was a hostage. We always take one when the tithe is due. The queen knew the price of keeping William. But if we offer to spare her kind until the next tithe is due, then she’ll let you and William pass through Faerie. You can take him back to your own time.”
I thought of the old stories, like Tam Lin, in which the fairies paid a tithe to hell with a human sacrifice to the devil. But it wasn’t to the devil, I saw now; it was to the nephilim, a bribe to keep them from killing their own. It made sense. And if the Fairy Queen had already bargained with the nephilim, perhaps she would again. William could travel back to Fairwick with me …
“But Callie will not do that.”
It was William, at my side, his hand in mine. I knew without looking at him that if he let me sacrifice his village for his life, he wouldn’t be the man I loved, just as he knew that if I sacrificed Fairwick to stay with him, I
