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“I can’t say I’m not happy to see you,” said Gullie, who floated up ahead of me and went to speak to my grandmothers.
“And I you, Gullie,” said grandmother Helen. “I only wish our reunion came at a better time and under better circumstances.”
“I know.”
“Any word from Dahlia?”
Gullie shook her head. “She’s gone, Helen. Exiled.”
My grandmother nodded. “That’s... troubling.”
“It’s a disaster, really,” Melina put in. “We have no way of getting to her, no way of contacting her.”
“The real disaster is the blood down my granddaughter’s face,” said Pepper, who had noticed the traces of brown on my skin that Valerian hadn’t quite managed to wipe off. She rushed over to me, her boots crunching against the snow, a plum-colored handkerchief in her hand. “What in the world happened to you, dear?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, putting my hands up. “Really.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing. Who did this to you?”
Valerian squeezed my shoulder. “It was Malys,” he said. I looked up at him and saw him scanning my grandmothers’ faces. “We should all talk… but maybe not here. We aren’t far enough away from the castle for my liking.”
“We’re far away from Lysa,” said Melina with a shrug. “If we get moving now, we may make it there by nightfall.”
Grandmother Helen scanned the grove we were in, then looked at her sisters. Each of them nodded. “This place will do… for now,” she said. “Sisters?”
Pepper took her place next to Helen and Evie. Each of them raised one hand to the sky, then they began to wave them in circles, counterclockwise. Valerian had a suspicious frown on his face, Melina shrugged, and Gullie also didn’t appear to know what was going on, but we could all feel the magic at work.
The power radiating from those three women was subtle, but intense. That they had survived in Arcadia on their own was already a testament to how strong they were. Arcadia had a habit of eating human hearts and twisting their shells into wicked monstrosities should they linger too long in this place where they were not meant to be.
My grandmothers were probably too difficult even for Arcadia to digest.
Astonished I watched as a portion of the woods around us began to suddenly bend and crack. It was as if the trees had decided they weren’t happy being rooted to the spots in which they were standing and chose to separate and rejoin in ways trees weren’t meant to move. They side-stepped, raised themselves, lowered themselves—it was like a weird dance of shifting branches, and trunks, and roots—and when they were done moving, I noticed the door.
It was small and brown, with wrought iron hinges and a knocker. Grandmother Helen flicked her wrist, and the door unlocked itself and opened, revealing a dark space beyond it. “Yes,” she said to herself, as if admiring her own work, “That will do.” She turned her eyes to me. “After you.”
“After me?” I asked. “Where will that door take me?”
“To a safe place. Your Maukibou may join us also.”
“You know what a Maukibou is?”
Grandmother Helen’s eyebrows arched. She tapped her fingers against her chin. “I wasn’t born yesterday, dear. Come, now—you’ll catch a cold out here.”
I still wanted to send my grandmothers back to Earth, where they would be safe, but I knew they wouldn’t let me open a portal out of hand. I was going to have to convince them, and that meant sitting down to talk to them… wherever they were about to take me. So, a little reluctantly, I walked over to this door in the middle of nowhere and stepped inside.
To my surprise, I wasn’t transported somewhere else. Instead, I found myself entering what looked like a cottage; a cottage similar to the one Valerian and I had stayed in before we came to Arcadia. Bulbs with small, buzzing motes of light in them sprang to life as I walked past them, illuminating the foyer of the house I had just entered. The air smelled of cinnamon and freshly baked bread. There were windows, and doors leading to other rooms, and even a staircase that went somewhere upstairs.
Stepping into what looked like a living room, I noticed a lit fireplace already starting to crackle and pop. A bay window overlooked the pond we had just come from, the scene quiet and serene. I wondered, suddenly, how in the world Colbolt was meant to fit in here. When I turned around to look at the front door, the ceilings were taller, and the entire room seemed to have expanded to accommodate the Maukibou as he lowered his head to enter.
“What is this place?” I asked, my voice bouncing off the walls and rising into the vaulted ceiling.
“A place of magic,” said Evie, her eyes lighting up.
“Fantastic, isn’t it?” asked Tallin. “It was a lot smaller last night.”
“This abode is precisely as large as we need it to be,” said Helen as she shut the door and entered the room behind Valerian and Melina. Gullie was already floating near the fireplace, warming up her hands. “More importantly, it should protect us from prying eyes. Pepper, dear, could you put a kettle on?” asked Helen.
“Already on it,” said Pepper with a warm smile.
