Page 40 of The Trick of It

“I thought Errol was an expert on plants and animals,” she said softly into the night. “Does he really mix up mushrooms?”

“Aye, well,” said Rhys seriously, “mushrooms aren’t plants. Or animals. Are they?”

She exhaled softly. “I suppose not,” she said. “So what are they?”

“Something else,” he told her. “There’s an illustration in that book of fairy circles, showing what they look like under the dirt.”

“Oh? What do they look like?”

“Like a big hand,” he said, holding his own up in a cup shape and spreading his fingers. “The circle of sprouts we see are just the fingertips poking out, ready to snatch you if you step inside.”

She giggled. “Does the book say that?”

“Of course not,” he answered, dropping his hand back onto his chest. “The mycologists are in on it.”

“Never trust a scientist,” she replied, still breathy with amusement.

“I shan’t,” he promised. “Believing everything has an explanation and you can find it is perhaps the most superstitious thing you can do, but they’ll never see it.”

“Ruby’s a scientist,” she pointed out. “And Errol too, I think? Botany is a science.”

“Ruby’s more a witch than anyone around that campfire tonight,” he answered. “And Errol could’ve been a druid high priest. You’re only proving my point.”

“Perhaps we should have them perform for Merlin too, then,” she said, stifling a little yawn, which jumped across the room and into Rhys’s throat.

He indulged it, his lungs expanding as he pulled the yawn inward and let it out and then puffed his cheeks out, giving his head a shake. “There’s probably more magic and wonder in what they do than in the lot of us,” he agreed. “I should just take him to the Rest and have us all re-perform our summer showcase.”

“The baroness’s funeral, you mean,” Seph echoed. “This last one was that, wasn’t it?”

“It was. That’s what he’s after, though, isn’t it? A funeral before he dies. That’s what this is.”

“Hm.”

He could feel her face screwing up in thought from across the room, her fingers tapping on her stomach where they were interlaced across her middle. “I think it might be a little unethical,” he added. “Fooling a dying man. Giving him false hope.”

“I thought you said people want to be tricked,” she reminded him, flashes of their walk across the grassy dune toward Starling’s Rest playing rising in the dark. Had that really only been a week ago? “I thought you said we love it. That it makes us feel wonder. That we seek it out.”

“I did say that,” Rhys acknowledged, a frown in his voice. “And I do believe it. It’s just the dying part that makes me pause. It feels like a vicar’s lie, not an illusionist’s, and that’s why I think it might be … I dunno. Murky.”

“Even if that’s what he asked for?” she said, turning to meet his eye across the void of darkness. “Even if that’s what he wants?”

Rhys sighed. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t, either,” she admitted. “But my mam always insisted that sleep helps untangle these knots. Maybe we’ll be clearer in the morning.”

“Seph,” he said fondly. “It’s morning right now. Already.”

“You know what I meant.”

He laughed. “I did,” he said. “Good night.”

“Good night, Rhys,” she replied, rolling away from him and curling up under her covers. “Sweet dreams.”

He waited until he heard her breathing steady. Until he knew she had fallen across the abyss and into Nod.

And then he followed her there, letting the darkness swallow him too.

Chapter Thirteen