With pounding heart Knife read through the few pages of the diary that remained. She had already begun to suspect Jasmine of having a hand in the Sundering, but even her darkest imaginings had not prepared her for Heather’s final entry: Lavender is lost to me, her reason and her memory overthrown; she babbles nonsense, and whenever I speak of humans she claps her hands to her ears and screams. The whole Oak is in chaos, faeries milling and bleating like sheep; they hear only Jasmine’s voice, not mine, no matter how I plead. The horror is unbearable-I cannot leave my daughter here-I must escape. Yet how can I return to Waverley, trapped in this small body and robbed of all my magic? Even if by some miracle I could survive the journey, how could I endure the sight of Philip’s face when he learns that he has lost not only his daughter, but his beloved Muse as well? Yet I have no choice. It will not be long before Jasmine discovers that my mind remains unclouded, and that I cannot submit to her schemes. I must leave tonight, with the moon to light my path and my little Valerian in my arms; for even if we perish, it will be a better fate than the one Jasmine offers us. I shall put this diary away in a secret place, with a prayer that someday it may be found by those with the wits to comprehend it, and the courage to bring the truth to light again. Forgive me that I can do no more. Farewell.
Numbly Knife let the diary fall. “Jasmine,” she whispered. “She cast the Sundering-but why? Why?”
She glanced over at Campion, but the Librarian’s eyes had closed again. Across the room, Thorn was still arguing with Valerian about the practical merits of eggs as opposed to children, and neither of them seemed to have noticed Knife’s distress.
Not that it mattered. She was grateful for their help, and Wink’s, too, but they had risked enough for her already. This riddle she would solve alone, even if she had to demand the truth from Queen Amaryllis herself.
And yet something nagged at her mind, a sense that she had the answer already but had somehow failed to see it. She thought back on all she had learned about Jasmine, fragments of Heather’s diaries floating through her mind: A gown in need of mending…the bodice was badly torn and one sleeve ripped… “I have gained some little skill as an artist since I went away.” She smiled, but her eyes remained bitter… I had thought she would be pleased with my good fortune, but her own sad experience had filled her with misgivings, and she all but pleaded with me not to go…
His temper was legendary, added Paul’s voice unexpectedly, and just like that, Knife knew. Jane Nesmith, the beautiful, the mysterious; the woman who had vanished, and left Alfred Wrenfield madly painting faeries…
Jasmine.
Slowly Knife bent and picked up Heather’s last diary from the floor. She laid it on the bedside table and said in her calmest voice, “I’m just going upstairs for a bit.” Then without waiting to hear what Valerian or Thorn would say, she slipped out.
Queen Amaryllis sat at her writing desk, her back to the door. She was dressed in a faded blue tunic and skirt that spoke less of elegance than comfort, her only mark of office a slim circlet about her brow. “What is it, Bluebell?” she said, but then her head came up like a fox on the scent and her body went very still, as though she had already realized her mistake.
“Your Majesty,” said Knife, “we need to talk.”
Twenty
“Have you returned already?” asked Queen Amaryllis, turning in her seat. Then her gaze fell to Knife’s bandaged ankle, and she exclaimed, “You are hurt!”
She sounded concerned, and Knife felt an unexpected stab of guilt. “It’s not serious,” she said. “I mean, it’ll take a few days to heal, but…that’s not what I came to tell you.”
Amaryllis’s brows rose. “Very well: Speak.”
Knife stood up straighter, gathering courage. “I didn’t go looking for other faeries today.”
“So you lied to me.” The Queen’s face darkened. “Why?”
Quickly Knife explained about Heather’s diaries and what she had learned from them, taking care not to mention Wink and Thorn, but to make it sound as though she had made all these discoveries alone.
“And once I knew Heather’s story,” she continued, “I was able to piece together Jasmine’s as well. She too had loved a human, an artist named Alfred Wrenfield-but one day he became angry and struck her, betraying her trust and shattering the bond between them. She left him and returned to the Oak, but all the while her bitterness grew, until she had convinced herself that all humans were just as brutal and unworthy as her lover had been. She tried to persuade the other faeries to stop going Outside, telling them they should be content with the skills and knowledge they already had. But no one listened to her, and in the end she decided the only way to free the Oakenfolk from their dependence on humans was by force.
“She murdered Snowdrop and took her place as Queen, then ordered all the faeries who had gone Outside to return to the Oak. They obeyed her without question, and once Heather’s child was born, she had only to wait for the next full moon to carry out her plan.
“On that night Jasmine stepped out of the Oak and cast a terrible dark magic spell, tapping into the power of all the other Oakenfolk and twisting it against them. First she changed their bodies, so that they could replace themselves with eggs instead of needing human mates. Then she confused their memories, so that they wouldn’t be able to remember what the Outside world was like; and finally she planted in them a powerful fear of humans, so that they would never be tempted to go near one again. The Sundering used up nearly all the power the Oakenfolk had, but Jasmine believed her actions would be worth the cost, for now her people would be free of human influence forever.
“Since then Jasmine and nearly all the faeries she changed have disappeared or died out,” Knife finished. “The new generation of Oakenfolk aren’t confused like the old ones were, and we’re not as frightened either. But still the belief that humans are monsters lives on-and now I know it’s killing us.”
Throughout this speech, Amaryllis had kept her eyes lowered and her face impassive. Now her head snapped up, and her voice took on a cutting edge as she replied:
“ That is killing us, you say? The simple belief that humans are a threat to our people? How can they be anything less, when they are so large and powerful, and we have so little magic with which to defend ourselves? And what of the other dangers that have claimed so many lives-the crows, the foxes, the electrical wires? What of the Silence, which has been responsible for nearly every death among us since the Sundering?”
The Queen rose from her chair, her face stony. “Have a care, Knife. You may well take pride in your own cleverness for discovering the truth-and yes, it is the truth, I do not deny it. But if you mean to tell me that after a few nights of skulking at windows and reading books you have learned more about humans than I knew after eighty years of living in their midst…”
“Eighty years?” said Knife, taken aback.
“A ‘scholarly venture,’ the historians called it,” said Amaryllis, her lips pursing with contempt. “In those days students of humanity such as myself were often overlooked, our work taken for granted. But without the information we passed back to the Oak, faeries like Heather would have been ill-prepared for their missions; they would have been unlikely even to meet gifted humans such as Alfred Wrenfield and Philip Waverley, let alone have opportunity to bond with them.”
Knife blinked at this, and the Queen’s mouth curled in a mirthless smile. “You look surprised: Did you think that all faeries who left the Oak were seeking human mates? No doubt Heather and Jasmine’s stories made you think so, but in truth such unions were rare. The rest of us made acquaintances among humans both male and female, but seldom became their close friends; in this way we could spread our influence more widely among them, and encourage them to greater creativity even if we could not inspire them to genius.”
“But…we couldn’t make eggs before Jasmine changed us,” said Knife slowly. “So if only a few faeries ever married humans, and only their daughters came back to the Oak…shouldn’t we have died out long before the Sundering?”
“In times of need,” said Amaryllis, “there were other ways of finding children. The stories about changelings are not wholly fables; though in truth it was not loved and wanted children that we took from the humans, but the orphaned, abused, and neglected. Jasmine herself was one such, though she would have scorned to admit it.”
“All right,” said Knife. “That makes sense-but there’s still something I don’t understand. If Jasmine cast her spell on everyone in the Oak, how did you escape?”
