“Our” mother. “Our” play, the letter said.
Phineas could meet his grandchildren, Stefen wrote.
His grandchildren. He means me and Miles.
Viola instead of Juliet. Sebastian instead of Stefen. I know these names. They are the twins from Twelfth Night who hid their true identities from everyone else—?in the book open right in my lap.
And then that horrible drawing with two birds and one egg.
There is a click in my brain, and everything comes into focus as clearly as George twisting the knob on Digby’s microscope.
Mother and Stefen hadn’t been foster siblings.
They had been flesh and blood twins.
My breath starts coming fast, and I reach up to feel Mother’s ring. Stefen had wanted this stone. He sounded almost desperate for it. And Mother had been planning to send it to him before she died and couldn’t follow through with her plan. Has Stefen been trying to find it all this time?
Has he been trying to find me?
My head is pounding. Something about this isn’t right. I stand and send the book tumbling to the ground. “I have to go.”
“Aila—” George says.
But I’m no longer listening. One of George’s pouches lying in the grass is the vibrant purple of Tempests. I grab for it and empty it over myself, and I’m already halfway across the clearing before George and Beas can draw another breath.
Chapter Fifty-Two
When I step from the train, Larkin is waiting for me, his hat pulled low. We board a bus shuttling tournament visitors to Sterling and sit in different rows. He takes off when we reach Sterling, and I hurry to keep him in my sights. It is jarring to follow Larkin through the center of town, as though the present is overlaying the past like a slab of warped glass. There is the gas station. The tailor where I got my ill-fated uniform. Fitzpatrick’s General Store. A new cinema and soda shop stick out like sores. The quiet sidewalks I remember are packed with visitors for the Sisters Tournament. We blend in better than I ever could have hoped.
The crowds thin the farther we get from town, and we cut into the woods to stay off the main road. I hurry to keep up with Larkin, who is moving quickly, and when we finally emerge out onto a dusty back road, I have to stifle a cry.
I recognize the house—?even now, even though it’s mostly burned. Something dark rises in my chest, into my throat. I never wanted to be here again.
This was the last place I ever saw Juliet alive. The site of the last conversation we ever had.
I turn my face away as we pass.
“Stefen?”
I blink. I can almost hear the fear in my foster mother Eleanor’s voice when I’d burst through the front door, probably looking murderous. I’d run all the way home from the lake that day, still burning with fury over what Matilda told me in the road. Once again, Juliet had something I didn’t. She’d gotten her reflection back.
But it was worse than that. She had disowned me, denied that we shared the same blood. Even to her closest friend in the world.
“Is everything all right?” Eleanor had asked.
I’d ignored her and flown up the stairs. My legs were shaking badly after the run. Even after years spent strengthening them, they still threatened to fail me.
Juliet startled when I entered her room. Her suitcase was pulled out onto her bed. When she turned to me, I noticed a fresh scratch on her cheek.
She smiled when she first saw me, but then her face fell at my expression.
“Have you come to join the witch-hunt, too?” she asked bitterly, turning away. “In case you haven’t heard, everyone hates me.”
She’d thrown one of her dresses into the suitcase.
“Well,” I croaked, my throat as dry as sandpaper, “maybe you deserve it.”
“Stefen!” A pile of freshly laundered shirts had tumbled from her hands. “What could you possibly mean?” She was looking at me with a wounded bewilderment that was maddening. I ground my teeth together.
