I had stopped moving, and Eva nudged me. “What are they doing?” I gasped.
“Keep walking, Sam,” she said.
“What are they?” I demanded.
“Spirits. They watch the living.”
The fog descended once more, and I lost sight of those countless gray watchers. I stumbled onward, and I wouldn’t have reached the portal without Eva’s relentless urging. She untied me from the cable, dragged me the last short distance to the door, and knocked upon it herself. As she did so, I had a moment’s lucidity, and I looked into her fierce eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She shook her head. “I want to do this,” she whispered back. Then the door opened, and a man I had never seen, presumably Pelham, stepped into the spirit realm to bind his thew.
I remember very little of the binding itself, or of what happened afterward. Pelham was businesslike, Draken was pleased, and Hornsby was self-congratulatory. Hornsby put me into the coachand told the driver to take me home. I wasn’t thinking clearly and gave my home address on Saddle Street. The moment we arrived, I realized and regretted my mistake, for my mother would be alarmed and I would be unable to explain my condition. But I had neither energy nor means to pay the fare back to Commonwealth.
It was the middle of the night. A light floated toward the shop door and came close to the glass. “It’s me, Sam,” I called out, with little conviction. A moment later Cris answered the door, and I collapsed into his arms.
I awoke in the morning in the room I’d once shared with Cris. His bed was neatly made, the white quilt as smooth as a tablecloth. My mother sat at the foot of my bed in the rocking chair, sewing by the light of the window beside her. “Samuel,” she said, the moment I opened my eyes. She rose and came to the bedside. Her face was creased with worry.
“Water,” I replied. I struggled to sit up, and she handed me a glass that stood on the side table. I drank my fill and leaned back with relief.
She clasped my hand in both of hers and gazed at my face, waiting.
“I’m sorry to have frightened you, Mamá.” My voice, I found, was hoarse.
She shook her head. “Just tell me what happened.”
I couldn’t tell her what had happened. If she knew how I’d been coerced by the Cisneros Society, her concern would be impossible to overcome. But I had to tell her something. “I was in the spirit realm,” I said.
She gasped. “Sam!”
“It’s necessary,” I said, looking down at my lap. “For my studies. For practice. I hope to bind a thew one day, and so I must learn how to enter the spirit realm.”
“Oh, Sam,” she said again, but this time her tone was one of resigned sadness. I looked up at her, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
Standing behind her was a spirit.
Pale, translucent, and mottled with gray bruises, she paced soundlessly across the room, through the beds and wardrobe, ignoring us entirely. Her hands, clenched into fists, trembled, and she beat them silently against her skirts to make them still. Abruptly she stopped, alert, her face adopting an expression of fervent terror, as if listening to a distant sound with bated breath. She waited, waited more. Nothing. Slowly her face relaxed, her bruised eyes blinking, and she turned to recommence her pacing.
I stared at the spirit in horror. My mother turned, following my gaze. “What is it?”
“Don’t you see her?” I whispered.
“See who?”
I shook my head and closed my eyes. “Nothing. Ignore me.”
I had heard about residues, those fragments of the spirit world that become visible when one has just returned from their realm. They are harmless—a person’s memories, nothing more, and within days they become invisible again—but I knew almost nothing about them, and no one had warned me how vivid and proximate they could be. As the figure continued her ceaseless pacing, I tried to reconcile the little I knew about residues with the fact of this restless being, inches from my bed.
I felt my mother’s hand on my forehead and she leaned in close. “Sam, won’t you consider coming home?” she asked quietly, her voice pleading, tremulous. “I know how much enchantment means to you, but the dangers…” She trailed off. “Cris and I would be so happy to have you back here. Each time you leave, I wonder if you’re coming back.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to persuade me to leave Commonwealth. For all of my childhood she had proudly supported my studies, and I believe she thought enchantment would be something like law or medicine, a field with challenges, true, but definable challenges that counted little against the incredible eminence of the result. And with good reason: all the enchanters she had ever heard of were men of reputation who seemed downright dull in their respectability. Not until my first year did she realize that the path taken by enchanters was fraught with dangers, and then her enthusiasm for my chosen profession began to wane. It pained me, but I was too much enamored of my studies to abandon them.
Now, when she asked again, how I wished that I could have obliged her. I wanted nothing more to do with Commonwealth, and nothing more to do with the Cisneros Society. My obsession was finally over. But the bargain was struck, and I feared the consequences of breaking it.
I stayed at home a few days, recovering, until the residues faded and my strength returned, and in those days I tried to persuade my mother and Cris that I was fine, and that my studies were progressing well. Perhaps they believed me.
When I returned to Commonwealth, I found a letter slipped under my door by the Cisneros Society, giving me an appointed date and time for another journey into the spirit realm.
This time I had almost two weeks to prepare, and I spent the time carefully. I read everything I could about the realm, but the enchanters were jealous of their knowledge and wrote in flowery generalities. Long before the Cisneros Society, enchanters had found ways to keep their path to power secret. After several days of furious but fruitless reading, I determined a different course of action. I would return to the spirit realm on my own time, and Iwould learn its ways before I was forced to return for the purposes of binding.
