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The bright colors of the sweetshop were starting to look nightmarish to Kami, garish and unreal. She tried to keep her voice measured as she asked: “Are you the wrong people? Because I’ve known you all my life.”
“And I’ve lived a lot longer than you have,” Mrs. Thompson told her. “I remember the days of red and gold.”
The days when the Lynburns used to kill people, and the rest of the town let it happen. The days that might be back again, if it was a Lynburn who had killed Nicola.
Kami thought of Jared, sick in the city with the year’s passing, of the golden knives he had seen and the rhyme about the Lynburns, and the deaths recorded in old newspapers. Her stomach turned over.
“Yeah, I’m just going to go,” Kami decided. She grasped the doorknob and pulled.
The door did not open. Instead the doorknob slid out of her grasp so quickly that she thought her hand had slipped, then she wasn’t quite sure. She stood staring at Mrs. Thompson as the shop bell sang its jaunty tune over their heads. The walls of the sweetshop swam in a rainbow blur before Kami’s eyes.
“Seriously,” said Kami, her voice faint. “I think I left the oven on at home. Or the iron. Possibly both.”
“Be careful, Kami,” Mrs. Thompson murmured.
Kami grabbed the knob again. The metal slid against her sweaty palm, making it clear to her that the wrench of the door out of her hand last time had been different, been deliberate as someone slamming it closed. This time, though, she got the door open and propelled herself through it, hurting her shoulder with how hard she hung on to the knob until she was over the threshold and into the street.
Kami stood in the street, rubbing her shoulder where she felt she had almost torn her arm out of its socket. She’d thought she knew every shadow and corner of this town, but now the shadows were moving, and behind every corner waited another secret. She reached out for the only sure thing in the world.
Jared, she said, I’m coming to see you.
The garden at Aurimere was being tamed slowly. No sooner had Uncle Rob got the wild gorse bushes under control than the climbing roses had burst thorns in every direction. The grass was too long again, twining in the breeze like a woman’s long hair in water. Jared had to wade through it to reach Uncle Rob, who was trying to trim the rosebushes.
Jared reached out for Kami so she could hear too, and said, “I broke into Monkshood Abbey today. Guess what I found there?”
Don’t ever become a spy, Lynburn, Kami told him. He could feel her, almost at Aurimere now.
Uncle Rob’s shears did not stop cutting. The sound of branches snapping and the clack of metal meeting echoed through the garden like the noise of a guillotine.
“A lesson, I imagine,” he said without looking up at Jared. His uncle’s broad shoulders were suddenly held more stiffly.
Jared stared at the back of Uncle Rob’s head, noticing that his hair was a shade between Ash’s and his own. “What sort of lesson?”
“In what happens to you if you cross the Lynburns of Aurimere House,” said Uncle Rob.
Jared waited a moment, but Uncle Rob did not offer anything else. The only sound was blackthorn branches falling onto the long grass. “The Lynburn crest was in that house. Why?”
There was a long pause. Jared thought that he wouldn’t get any answer except for the sound of slicing roses.
Not turning around, his voice level and dispassionate, Uncle Rob said, “Because Lynburns used to live there. My parents, and me when I was very young.”
Jared was shocked silent. He’d always thought of all the Lynburns as belonging to Aurimere, but of course Uncle Rob had different parents from Mom and Aunt Lillian. “Why was it abandoned? What happened?”
Uncle Rob tossed the shears down, steel blades gaping open and hungry. Jared took a step back at the look on his face.
“My parents displeased the Lynburns of Aurimere. Our leaders, to be feared and obeyed, our judges and executioners. The Lynburns of the House came to Monkshood and killed them and took me as sorcerer breeding stock for one or the other of their daughters. I think perhaps you can understand why I never went back. And why I never wanted to come back to this town.”
Jared stared into Uncle Rob’s blue eyes. He didn’t know what to feel: he was sorry for Uncle Rob, who had never been anything but kind to him, but he could not suppress the selfish despairing horror at yet another terrible chapter of this book of his ancestors. “They killed your parents,” he said slowly. “And you married Aunt Lillian?”
Uncle Rob told him, “I learned my lesson.”
Kami screamed for Jared in his head. He realized she was alone in Aurimere with his mother.
Kami knocked on the door of Aurimere and hoped, since Jared was getting somewhere with Uncle Rob, that Ash would answer. He was the best of three bad options. She was rehearsing a speech along the lines of “Let’s skip the romantic awkwardness and move to you telling me everything there is to know about your sorcerous lifestyle” when the door opened.
It was Rosalind Lynburn. Her skin was paper white, her pale hair flowing, and her lips parted, like a ghost who had seen a ghost. She said, “Kami Glass.”
Kami nodded. “Me again.”
