“Let me say goodbye, at least,” I snapped at him. “One more minute is no skin off your nose.”
Sylvester released me and stood, swaying a little. Da kept one hand on his shoulder, to steady him.
“There must be something else we can try,” Da whispered urgently.
Sylvester shook his head. “I am too weak,” he said. “I am sorry. And even if I could fight him without the advantage of surprise ... I have only a handful of hearts left, all near corrupted, and he has half a kingdom’s worth. It was a fool’s hope to begin with, but we had to try. Without a good heart, I’m no better than a hedge-witch telling fortunes.”
I squeezed my eyes tight shut. Despite the heartsickness, my pain and exhaustion, I had traveled across two kingdoms, murdered a magic-worker—as Cornelius had pointed out—won the heart of a sorcerer, and, overall, done more than I had ever thought was possible ... And it still was not enough in this last, crucial moment.
“Sylvester,” I pleaded. “We have to try. Please. Just one more time. Use all the hearts we have. We have managed impossible things together before.”
“I don’t have the strength,” he said.
“Yes, youdo,” I snapped.I grabbed both his hands in mine. “You said our connection is powerful. Use it. Use whatever we have left. We have to try, even just once.”
He looked at me with those strange, light eyes and nodded.
“What are you doing?” asked the king, but it was too late, because Sylvester had already begun to weave a spell. It wrapped around us like ivy. I felt the power of all the hearts we had salvaged start to glow and burn in my veins. I looked up at Sylvester, and he looked back at me with his usual cool, blank stare.
“I ... I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, and smiled. Then he reached for me, embraced me, and I felt the coiling magic flow away from me and into him. Whatever was pulling at me, tugging at me, using the power left in my poor heart, reversed itself and started flowing back toward him. I tried to clutch at it as you would clutch at a rope slipping through your fingers, but it squirmed beneath my touch and wriggled free.
“Sylvester. No.” This wasn’t the plan. “What are you doing?”
“We’re not meant to be here, Foss,” he said. “Any of us. But you are.”
The words died in my mouth. Sylvester’s eyes were wider and darker than I had ever seen them.
He kissed me, a fierce kiss withgoodbyespoken silently in every second of it, and then he pulled away, and I saw that he was clutching something in his fist. I thought at first that it might be one of his magical toys, but it was too small.
Dread came over me. I felt for the seal in my pocket—its familiar smooth sides and carved top. It wasn’t there.
“Sylvester, you idiot!” I yelled. He smiled a wide, heartbreaking smile, just for me.
“I heard you talking with the Weftwitch. I know what this is. I know what I have to do.”
“No! No, I was never going to use it!Sylvester! Don’t you dare!”
“I know you never would,” he said. “Which is why I must.”
His gaze reached out across the small distance between us, as it had the very first time we met, and like that first time, I felt it pierce me like a thorn and open me like a flower.
It was already too late, I knew. Sylvester had whispered his intentions to the seal, and its terrible, inexorable work had begun. The Weftwitch’s magic was sure and swift. Terrible pressure built in the air around us, and the sky turned black as a bruise. The Other Kingdom’s revenge was powerful.
The crowd swayed like so many ears of corn. The king staggered, his face fixed in a grimace of rage and confusion.
Sylvester floated a little way off the ground, his cloak swirling around, the seal in his open palm blooming like a black rose as its poisonous magic spread to encompass us all.
Well. I should have been terrified, but instead, all I felt was a great boiling annoyance at him and his ridiculous desire to sacrifice himself.
That annoyance rose up in me, all tangled with love—both the bespelled love and the real—and then that in turn tangled with the powerful magic of the seal and Sylvester’s own wild, erratic powers, until we were both knitted together again, even more strongly than before.
My own feet rose off the ground until I was right opposite him, staring into his perfect face and his startled eyes.
“Foss . . .? What are you . . .?”
This time I kissed him, putting all of that mess of power, anger, and longing into it, even as I felt the Other Kingdom’s spell start to drain his power away, unmaking him from the inside out.
