“I have a confession to make,” I said to my sisters a little later as we sat in our bedchamber, shocked and quiet. “I don’t want to tell you, but I think I have to. This is probably all my fault.”
They sat in total silence as I recounted my conversation with 151
Tadeusz. I did not include quite everything he had said, but by the end of my account they were staring at me, incredulous.
“Jena!” exclaimed Paula. “You’re supposed to be the sensible one! What on earth possessed you to listen to him? Have you forgotten everything you know about the Night People?”
“He said that was old wives’ tales,” I told her miserably.
“That we didn’t really know what they were like. And that could be true. It sounds as if someone walked right past the charms of ward at the miller’s house. So much for all those stories about garlic and silver crosses.”
“That’s if it was one of them who did it,” said Tati. She was shivering even though she had her thick woolen shawl wrapped around her, and her face was pinched and pale.
“Of course it was, Tati,” said Iulia. “You heard what Petru said. You just don’t want to believe it because of Sorrow. You don’t want to admit that he could have been the one responsible.”
Tati was on her feet, eyes wild. “He wasn’t! Sorrow would never do something wicked like that—he couldn’t!”
“We can’t know that,” put in Paula calmly. “We can’t really know much about the Other Kingdom, even though we’ve been visiting Dancing Glade for so long. It’s full of tricks and traps, masks and mirrors. Tati, I know you won’t like this, but Sorrow could be anything at all. The face he shows you may be only the one he wants you to see.”
Relieved to have my younger sisters’ support on the issue of Sorrow, I risked a new suggestion. “There is one way to see the truth about the Other Kingdom,” I said. “We could go across 152
at Dark of the Moon and look in Dr?agu?ta’s mirror, as Tadeusz told me. We could see the future. And if we could do that, we could change it—take action to prevent the bad things from happening.”
There was a silence.
“Jena,” said Paula, “I’ve spent a lot of time with the soothsayers and wizards of the Other Kingdom. We’ve talked about tools for divining the future. We’ve talked about portals and the way that time and space work between their kingdom and ours. Nobody ever said a thing about a magic mirror.”
“Maybe they only tell you what they want you to know.”
My voice was a little sharp. I felt as if I were walking on a knife edge. A girl had died horribly. The men would be out there tonight with their crossbows and cudgels, their pitchforks and scythes, hunting the Night People down. Yet something still drew me toward Dark of the Moon. It was not so much Tadeusz’s beguiling voice, though I knew that was part of it.
Even after this—even after innocent blood had been spilled—
I felt its pull. But far more powerful was the thought that Dr?agu?ta’s mirror might provide the answers we so badly needed.
So easily, I could know whether Father would come home again; I could know whether Tati would get over her foolish in-fatuation and be safe. And if I went there, I could confront Tadeusz with what he had done. I could tell him that this vile act of bloodletting was not what I had wanted; that the price for mending a few fences should not be the life of an innocent young woman. I could make it clear that I had never asked for such offerings and that there were to be no more of them.
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“You wouldn’t actually go, would you, Jena?” Iulia was looking at me with a mixture of alarm and admiration. “After what’s just happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. In my pocket Gogu was still, as if frozen. I could feel his horror.
“It might not be your fault, Jena,” Paula said. “It’s possible that the girl’s father did something to make the Night People angry, like setting fires in the forest or felling an oak. You can’t know.”
“I do know.” I took Gogu out and held him between my hands for comfort. “I can feel it. I can feel things turning dark.
It started when the Night People came. It got worse when Tati encouraged Sorrow. Now I’m responsible for someone’s death. I have to put it right somehow.”
“I told you, this is not Sorrow’s doing, Jena.” Tati was huddled on the bed now, hugging the shawl around her. “He’s the kindest of men, gentle and good.”
“To you, maybe,” I said.
A small voice spoke. “Tati wouldn’t fall in love with a murderer.”
Stela’s words hung in silence for a little, then Iulia cleared her throat. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Love makes people do some odd things. I mean, Jena loves Gogu best in the world, doesn’t she? A frog. That’s just about the weirdest thing you could imagine.”
Gogu twitched as she spoke his name. Then, abruptly, a 154
sort of cloud fell over his thoughts, as if he were deliberately hiding them from me. “That’s not the same kind of love,” I said.
“Anyway, Tati hardly even knows Sorrow.”
Tati said nothing.
“Love at first sight,” put in Paula. “If it happens in stories, why shouldn’t it happen in real life?”
“It’s a mistake to let your head get full of stories about true love,” I said. “It just means you’ll be disappointed. There are no handsome heroes in the real world—only boring young men like R?azvan and Daniel. That’s probably the best any of us can hope for.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it, Gogu,” I said later in the day, as I threw out grain for the chickens under a
