“I don’t know.”
“So that’s it, then? We’re trapped here until your father finds us?”
It was infuriating. On the other side of that barrier sat a whole other world, a world that apparently contained the magic to heal my heart and save my Da, and we could not access it.
The mist might look insubstantial, but it might as well have been a wall a hundred miles high. If we didn’t manage to find a way through it, I thought, we were lost. All the hearts were lost, not just mine. And I would become another one of the king’s experiments.
Wait.The king’s experiments.I remembered how he had toyed with the jar holding my heart. How Clarissa had told me that I had a special resistance to magic.
“Use my heart,” I said.
“What?”
Even Cornelius was looking at me as if I was crazy.
“Use my heart to cast your spells.” I brought out the jar from my pocket and tried not to look at the piece of myself that was sloshing around inside.
“Even if I were to ... use it,” said Sylvester, “it would not be enough. I don’t know how many hearts could bring down a spell as strong and old and weighty as this one, but it’s probably more than we could gather in a year.”
“It will work,” I insisted. I felt certain, oddly certain, that this was the right thing to do.
“Foss,” argued Sylvester gently. “Even if it did work, we are traveling to find someone who can make your heart whole again. You need both parts.”
“That’s not the only reason we’re doing this,” I said. “I am not the only one who is broken and needs mending. There are many. And if your father and sisters do not stop harvesting, there will be many more. I don’t know what we will learn outside of the kingdom, but there must be some knowledge out there that we don’t have, that will help us. That we can bring back.”
“You don’t know for sure that we will find out anything of use, or if this heart mender even exists.” He seemed to be pleading with me, oddly.
“We have to try,” I urged him. “It will work. I know it.”
Sylvester stared at me and then at the jar.
“I know it,” I repeated. “And besides,” I tried to sound cheerful, “I’ve survived without it this long.”
“You will never again be whole,” he said.
“We don’t know that. Maybe this Weftwitch will be able to help in some way, once we get there.”
He sighed. “Fine. But I do this under protest.”
“So long as you do it.”
I held out the jar, and he took it. There was not the same sense of violation, of wrongness, as when the king had held it. It actually felt almost comforting, seeing my heart beat in his hands. Perhaps that was all part of the spell. He left the carriage and walked toward the mist again, holding my heart this time.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Cornelius.
“I think so,” I said.
Cornelius curled up on my lap when I arranged the furs about me again, as if to give me some measure of comfort.
I do not understand the exact mechanics of what Sylvester did when casting a spell. I wondered if he would even be able to explain them in a way I could understand, if I asked, or if it would be like trying to explain air to a fish.
From the outside, it had never looked like much. I had seen him perform minor magicks now and then with little ceremony, to create his toys and little fires. And even the larger tricks I had witnessed—opening the palace door—had been accomplished with little more than a gesture.
If his father’s boundary spell was as wide and strong and deep as he had described, however, it would require something of the strength needed to uproot an ancient tree whose roots had become as complex as a city full of streets and alleyways.
Cornelius and I both pressed our noses to the crystal window and watched Sylvester’s tall, black figure stride to the very edge of the mist and stand there, arms upraised as if he meant to embrace it.
By a trick of the shifting fog and gray morning light, he looked like a raven gliding over snow. The shapes in the mist seemed to bend and sway in response to the sorcerer’s movements.
