They left us. Cornelius stretched luxuriously and said, “I didn’t know how hard it would be, not talking to anyone. I suppose I’ve gotten used to it.”
“It was for the best,” I said. “If they reacted that way to a magic-worker, I can’t imagine they would have been too thrilled with a talking cat.”
Sylvester rubbed at the faint rope marks on his wrists.
“Thank you for not ... magicking anything,” I said to him.
“It would not have helped,” he said.
We stared at the wood—this supposed magic-less place—and it seemed to stare back at us. There was a sense of something watching and listening. Not something unfriendly, necessarily, but something that was assessing us and waiting to see if we would be friend or foe.
“I’m not going anywhere near it,” said Cornelius. “What if it snatches my voice away, and I can’t get it back?”
“Fair point,” I agreed. “You can wait here for us.”
“How long will you be?”
“How am I supposed to know that?” I said. “I have no idea what we’re going to find in there.”
“Fine.” Cornelius sharpened his claws on a tree trunk, then settled himself neatly at its base.
“Ready?” I said to Sylvester, who looked a little apprehensive. He nodded.
“Right,” I said, and stepped over an invisible boundary.
Even I, the most unmagical person you could ever hope to find—practically the opposite of a magical person in fact— could feel the difference at once. The world became denser and thicker, and even a little dimmer, as if seen through a widow’s veil.
Sylvester, apparently, felt the difference like a bag of rocks dropped on his head, judging by the way he reacted. He bent over double, his tall frame crumpling in the middle, and started gasping, hands pressed to his heart.
It looked a little like my heartsickness felt, I observed with quasi-scientific interest, and not a little malicious satisfaction.
“Help me,” he gasped.
I had to admit, I was taking a little pleasure in his suffering after all he had inflicted on me, intentionally or not, but I went over to him anyway. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I rested one hand on his shoulder in a show of sympathy. He leaned into me heavily, setting me off balance, and I ended up supporting his weight.
I braced for the flood of love and desire to rush through me, as it usually would, but nothing happened. I backed away from him, shocked, and he nearly fell over.
“What was that for?” he shouted, sounding almost like a normal person.
“Nothing,” I whispered. “There’s nothing.”
“What?”
“I don’t feel it,” I said, more loudly. I stood up straight, letting my spine uncurl and my throat loosen to let in a long, clean ribbon of breath. I had not realized how tensely I had been holding myself. Forweeks.
That terrible, wonderful, all-consuming love and obsession was gone, like a fever finally breaking. And, as in the aftermath of a fever, I felt light and cleansed and free, shivering a little as my skin accustomed itself again to covering just ordinary old Foss, and not a boiling, infesting passion that could barely be contained. The air, even in this strange, heavy place, tasted light.
Sylvester, on the other hand, looked terrible. His eyes had violet petals of fatigue beneath them, and the carved perfection of his cheekbones now looked somehow hollow. “You don’t feel that?” he managed to say.
“The spell,” I said. “The spell has gone. It can’t survive here.”
And, more—now that the overwhelming love and devotion of the spell was missing, I could truly feel the absence of half my heart. It was hollow and yearning, like an empty belly, but deeper, more profound: perhaps like the emptiness a mother feels after her babe has left her womb.
I had never felt it, not truly, and now there was no chance of reuniting my heart with itself, because we had turned it to ash and powder in coming here, and it was gone forever.
A terrible, yawning grief filled me, a grief so wide and high that it blotted out the sky, and I clutched at a tree trunk to steady myself.
“Foss,” came Sylvester’s voice from far away. “What is wrong?”
