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"String me in your harp," Val hissed. "And I'll curse you every time you pluck it."
Roiben stood. "Do you agree to the terms of her challenge?" he queried, and Val suspected that he was giving her a chance to do something, but she didn't know what.
"No," Val said. "I can't bargain for Luis. He's got nothing to do with my challenge."
"I can bargain for myself," Luis said. "I agree to Mabry's terms provided she put up something for them. She can have me, but if Val wins, then we go free. We get to walk out of here."
Val glanced at Luis, grateful for his perception and amazed by her own stupidity.
Roiben nodded. "Very well. If the mortal wins, I will give her and her companion safe passage through my lands. And since you have not decided the terms of your combat, I will choose them—you will fight until first blood." He sighed. "Do not think there is any pity in that. Living, should Mabry win your hearts and bones, does not seem so preferable to being safely dead. I, however, have some questions for Mabry that I need her alive to answer. Now, Thistledown, unclasp the mortals and give the girl her arms."
The golden-haired man slid a jagged-toothed key in the locks and the manacles sprang open, dropping to the ground with a hollow sound that echoed through the dome.
Luis stood a moment later, rubbing his wrists.
A woman with chin hair so long that it was woven into tiny braids brought the glass sword to Val and went halfway down on one knee, raising the blade in her palms. Tamson's sword. Val glanced at Mabry, but if she had any reaction to the sight of it, if she even remembered to whom it had once belonged, she gave no sign.
"You can do it," Luis said. "What does she know about fighting? She's no knight. Just don't let her distract you with glamour."
Glamour. Val looked at her backpack, the strap still draped over Luis's shoulder. There was nearly a bottle full of Never there. If glamour was Mabry's weapon, then Val could fight her on those terms. "Give me the bag," Val said.
Luis slid it down his arm and handed it to her.
Val reached in and touched the bottle. Digging down past it, her hand closed on a lighter. It would just take a moment and then Val would be flooded with power.
As she turned, she saw her face reflected in the glass of the blade, saw her own bloodshot eyes and grime-streaked skin before the roving lights under the hill shot the sword through with sudden radiance. Val thought of the girl, Nancy, hit by a train because she was so full of Never that she hadn't seen the gleaming of headlights or heard the scream of brakes. What might Val miss while she was weaving her own illusions? She felt the weight of the knowledge hit her gut like a swallowed stone; she had to do this without any Never singing under her skin.
Val had to fight Mabry with what she knew—years of lacrosse and weeks of the sword, fistfights with neighbor kids, who never said she hit like a girl, the ache of pushing her body past what she thought she could endure. Val couldn't fight fire with fire, but she could fight it with ice.
She dropped the lighter and lifted the glass sword from the girl's hands.>"No." Val's mother's voice had a note of panic in it. "Valerie, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry about everything. You don't know how worried I've been about you, the things that I've been imagining. I kept waiting for the phone call that would say the police had found you dead in a ditch. You can't put me through that again."
"There's something I have to do," Val said. "And I don't have much time. Look, I don't understand about you and Tom. I don't know what you were thinking or how it happened, but—"
"You must think that I—"
"But I don't care anymore."
"Then why—" she started.
"This isn't about you and I can't come home until it's finished. Please."
Her mother sighed. "You failed your driving test."
"Can you drive?" Luis asked.
"I have my permit," Val said to her mother, then glanced at Luis. "I can drive fine. I just can't parallel park."
Val's mother padded into the kitchen and came back with a key and an alarm hanging from a key-chain with a rhinestone "R" on it. "I owe you some trust, Valerie, so here it is. Don't make me regret it."
"I won't," Val said.
Val's mother dropped the keys into Val's hand. "You promise you'll be back tomorrow? Promise me."
Val thought of the way her lips had burned when she hadn't kept her promise to return to Ravus on time. She nodded. Luis opened the front door. Val turned toward it, not looking at her mother. "You're still my mom," Val said.
As Val walked down her front steps, she felt the sun on her face, and it seemed that at least one thing might be okay.
Val drove the car through the familiar roads, reminding herself to signal and watch her speed. She hoped that no one would pull them over.
