Drip.
Drip.
A dim picture came into focus on-screen: Valmordion encased in a hazy sheath of ice, melting atop its pedestal.
Drip.
Drip.
Domenic white-knuckled his armrests.
“What’s wrong?” Ellery whispered.
“Oh. Uh. Nothing.”
She squinted at him, like she knew better. Then she swallowed and fixed her focus back on the screen.
Gradually, the ominous opening image faded, replaced by text:Leetmere.The screen brightened with daylight, and birdsong filled the theater. A young girl scampered barefoot across a forest floor. She moved quickly, with purpose.
Goose bumps prickled up Domenic’s neck.
He peeked over his shoulder at the party in his family’s garden, celebrating the first day of Summer. No one had noticed him slip away. He crawled beneath the hedges, soiling the knees of his trousers. Something squeezed tight in his chest, eager and exciting, urging him to follow. Instinctively, heknew where it led. He’d always known, had struggled his entire life to sit still, to pay attention. He wasn’t good at being patient.
On-screen, sinewy white roots threaded through the detritus, and the girl halted. The camera panned up, following the trunk of a massive alban tree.
The grass parted, and he ran down its path until at last, the forest eased into meadow. Pollen whirled in a soft, dreamy vortex, and at its center, there stood an alban tree.
Rhodes halted beneath it.
Domenic craned his neck back, sunlight kissing his cheeks.
Rhodes reached up. A branch bent toward her, and briar entwined her fingers.
He climbed, and once he emerged at its top, he gazed triumphantly at the surrounding field. The meadow bloomed for him. And for the first time, finally, his magic bloomed with it.
In the present, Domenic squeezed Valmordion. Beside him, Ellery, too, looked haunted.
As the film continued, Domenic was unsure he blinked, even breathed. Though Rhodes’s story didn’t perfectly match his own, he had the uncomfortable impression it was his life on-screen, his most intimate moments laid bare to an audience who watched, not with understanding, but with morbid fascination.
After what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than ninety minutes, Alice Rhodes stood on a mountain summit. Sweat poured down her forehead, mixing with a bloodied cut on her brow. Icy storm clouds ruptured above her as if she’d cleaved a crater across the sky. As the winds stilled, the score cut out. The only sound was the pounding of Rhodes’s heartbeat.
She lowered Valmordion toward her lips.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Domenic braced himself. Ellery hitched her breath. But neither dared to break character. Even in the dark, stares pressed against them from all sides. Stares that looked but didn’t see.
The theater brightened as Rhodes ignited.
The special effects were dramatic and crude. Flames caught across her skin as easily as tissue paper, yet even as they consumed her, as her profile thinned from round cheeks to the sharp angles of bone, she didn’t so much as whimper. Flecks of gray peeled off her face and flurried into the air. The locket dangling from her neck glowed molten. Too quickly, all that remained of her was a charred, mangled shape, somehow still standing, still dignified, already a monument beneath a glorious, Summer-blue sky.
One hundred and fourteen years later, her successor, every bit as dignified, hurled up a cloaking enchantment and bolted outside.
How welcome the night’s cold was. Domenic darted through Mercester Square and ducked into the half-privacy of the bus stop, gasping as he wrenched the bow tie from his throat. The image of Rhodes and the alban tree seeped over his own memory, staining what few precious parts of it he hadn’t already lost to its excruciating aftermath: the realization that he’d been gone not hours, but days. His family’s realization that he’d been gone at all. And worst, the way they’d looked at him from then on—like he was alien to them, unknowable to them.
Dead to them.
Domenic’s fingerprint had always been among a dozen on Valmordion’s shaft. But it still disturbed him how closely his story mirrored one that ended in tragedy.
