"Yes," Kingston finishes for him. "I've seen it happen."
What? I look at Kingston. "You have? When? Where? Did Morgan--"
"No," he says quickly, and just as quickly apologizes for interrupting me. "I'm sorry."
God, it'd be irritating if it weren't so sincere. I shake my head. "It's all right."
He nods. "No. Not Morgan. This sort of thing is beyond what she can do. But yes, I've witnessed things imbued with magic."
He leaves it at that.
"And do you think," Emrys puts in, his gaze drifting back to the dress and crown, "that perhaps this is that? Something imbued?”
Kingston shakes his head. "I was hoping you could tell us."
Silently, pensively, he looks back to the costume.
We all do.
I can't help it. I have to. Morbid, maybe, but if this was what I would have died in--I want to see it again, touch it again. Properly. Wordless, I get out of my seat and take the dress in hand, shaking it out to its full length out in front of me. It's long, loose, and two pieces, I realize now—a ballooning white blouse and a red sort of smock with those wide stripes of gold-and-blue embroidery down the middle, from top hem to bottom.
There’s lettering in it, I see now. Words.
I tighten my hold, bring it closer to my face like I’m reading a book, and as I do?—
Crack.A snap, ashock,spikes against my hands like a firecracker going off.
"Ah!" I wince, suck in a gasp of pain, and drop it in surprise. The fabric billows to the ground, and as it falls it?—
Shifts.
Rippling through the air, the red goes dull. The sheen of the fabric coarsens. And when the dress hits the floor, it's nothing like what it was. Brown, rough. Ugly.
It hastransformed.
I stare, disbelieving, mouth open, but I barely have time to react, because Kingston is leaping up to my side.
"Watch out!"
He catches me, hard, around the chest, and pushes me away from--fromfire,I realize, leaping white flames engulfing the red crown on the table just beside me. In a split second, the thing curls and blackens, disintegrates, and the flames crackle out.
Gone. Like they'd never been there.
My mouth is hanging open. I look at Kingston, whose eyes are wide with alarm, and Emrys, who stands motionless and staring. Astonished, almost amazed.
"What..." I suck in a breath. "What the hell was that?"
Emrys peers from the pile of ashes on the coffee table to the rumpled mass of brown at my feet. "I was hoping you could tell us, Ms. Vale.”
"I..." I shake my head. “I didn’t do that.”
My mind flies to another day with Emrys. When I'd just gotten back from Roaring Brook, when Emrys had laid out for me his theory that the Grail was a person, that that person wasme.What he’d told me.
Things have happened to you that you can't explain.
He wasn’t wrong then. And now…
DidI do this?
