went into her room, fell on her cot, and within moments was deeply asleep.
Late in the afternoon she woke again, her stomach snarling with hunger; but when she arrived at the Dining Hall, she received only glares and a plate of limp greens. Furious all over again, Knife stalked back up the Stair to her room, wolfed down a handful of dried berries, and sat by the window, chewing.
I should have stayed in the House, she thought mutinously. It would serve them all right if I left the Oak this minute, and never brought them so much as a road-flattened hedgehog again.
Swallowing her meager supper, she spread her notes across the table and began to review them-but it was no use. In the fevered concentration of last night her jottings had made perfect sense, but now she could barely read her own handwriting, let alone recall what all those hasty abbreviations meant.
Sighing, Knife pulled over a fresh page and let her charcoal pencil wander across it. It was no use being angry at Mallow: If Valerian was right, there was nothing Knife could do to change her mind, anyway. But she could at least prove that she had not forgotten her duty.
Her wrist relaxed and her fingers moved of their own accord, sending black lines looping across the paper. She’d get up early tomorrow, before anyone else, and hunt until she’d found some prey worth having. It wouldn’t take much, if she were lucky: all she really needed was one good-sized…
Knife bolted upright, staring at the page. Instead of random scribbles, the lines she had drawn formed a single, coherent shape: the plump body and upraised listening ears of a rabbit.
No, it couldn’t be. She must have imagined it. She snatched up her drawing and held it closer to the light. But however she turned the paper, it still looked like a rabbit. With no magic, no training, and hardly any effort, she had done what no faery had done for over a century: She had created art.
Unthinkable, impossible-yet it was real, it was hers. With almost reverent care, Knife laid the drawing aside, then grabbed another sheet and bent over it, scratching furiously. Please the Gardener it hadn’t just been an accident!
When she straightened up again Old Wormwood glared back at her from the page, wings spread and claws outstretched to strike. Not a crude likeness this time but an exact one, right down to the mad glint in his eyes; it made her wing ache to look at it.
Instinct told her that the drawing was good, even brilliant. Yet part of her still refused to accept that this talent could be real. She needed a second opinion-but whom could she trust with a secret as enormous as this?
There was only one answer to that, and she knew it without thinking: Paul.
By the time it was dark enough to leave the Oak, Knife was fidgeting with impatience. She rolled up the picture of Old Wormwood and slipped it down the bodice of her tunic, then climbed through the window and launched herself headlong into the night.
She had to rap at Paul’s window several times before he answered. “I knew something was out there,” he said as he slid it open. “But I didn’t think you’d be back so soon-come in, quick.”
Knife ducked under the window and sat down on the inside of the sill. “I have something to show you. I need to know what you think,” she said, and she pulled the drawing out and gave it to him.
Paul squinted at it. “It’s too small. Just a minute.” He rolled to his desk, rummaged through the drawer, and returned with a large round lens, which he held up between himself and the page. “It’s…a crow,” he said blankly.
“Is it good?” asked Knife, her heart skittering. “I mean, it isn’t just a sort of crow-shaped scribble?”
“It’s very good,” Paul confirmed in distracted tones, his lens hovering over the sketch. “What is it, charcoal? The stick must have been tiny-” He lowered the glass to stare at her. “You mean you did this?”
Knife nodded.
“I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me you were an artist?”
“Because I’m not,” she said. “Or at least, I wasn’t, until…” Until I met you.
“That’s ridiculous,” Paul said impatiently. “You must have had training, or at least plenty of practice. Nobody develops this kind of eye for detail overnight.”
“I know,” said Knife. “That’s why I didn’t think it could really be any good-but if it is, then…”
Then perhaps the Oakenfolk of Heather’s day hadn’t just borrowed creative ideas from the humans they met Outside; they’d absorbed their creative abilities as well. I have gained some little skill as an artist, Jasmine had told Heather, since I went away…
“I don’t understand,” Paul said.
Knife hesitated, wondering how much to tell him. Then she got to her feet and jumped off the sill, landing lightly on the end of Paul’s bed. She walked up to the pillow and sat down, tucking her feet beneath her.
“What are you doing?” asked Paul.
“Making myself comfortable,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat? Because I think this story is going to take a while.”
“I had no idea,” said Paul slowly, when she was done. “I knew something must have gone wrong when you said you couldn’t do magic, but this…”
Knife swallowed her last bite of biscuit, brushing the crumbs from her fingers. “I know,” she said. “It’s big.”
She had said little about the Oakenfolk’s past connection to the human world; she was still trying to understand that aspect of the problem herself. But she had told him about the Sundering, how their population had dwindled and their culture decayed rapidly in its wake; and finally she had explained about her people’s lack of creativity, and why she had been so surprised to find herself able to draw.
“And now you’re trying to find out how this Sundering thing happened?” said Paul. “So then you’ll know how to get your magic back-and maybe your art, too?”
“That’s part of it,” she said. “I have a lot more questions, but I have a feeling they’re all connected somehow.”
Paul drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, his gaze abstracted. “What about your Queen?” he asked.
“What about her?”
“Well, she must know about your people’s past-she lived through it, after all. Why isn’t she telling you what you need to know?”
“I’ve wondered about that myself.”
“Stop me if I’m going too far,” said Paul, “but it’s pretty strange that she was the only one who wasn’t in the Oak when the Sundering happened. Do you think she might be the one who did it?”
“I…don’t know what to think,” said Knife. “In some ways it makes sense, but in others, it doesn’t. She might have become Queen that way, but what did she really gain? There are so few of us now, and we have so little.”
“Hmm,” said Paul.
Knife jumped up from the bed and brushed at her skin waistcoat and breeches, dusting off the last remnants of biscuit. “I should go. It’s late. No, keep it,” she said as Paul offered her back her picture. “I’ve got no use for it, anyway. But I am grateful-”
“I’ve noticed,” Paul interrupted, “you never say ‘thank you.’”
She tensed. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it means something to us that it doesn’t to you. We don’t say it lightly.” Or ever.
He gave her a quizzical look. “So…what does it mean to you, then?”
Knife tilted her head back, searching for words. “It means,” she said, “that the one you… thank…has done something so enormous for you that you could never begin to repay them. And that no matter how long you live, you’ll always be in their debt.”
“Can you give me an example? Do you know anyone who-”
“Not in my lifetime. It’s that rare.”
Paul’s brows rose. “No wonder you don’t like to hear me say it,” he said. “All right, then: I’m grateful you stopped by tonight. Is that better?”
“Much,” said Knife.
With Heather’s diary finished and nothing more to read, Knife found herself increasingly restless. She could
