Untold (37 page)
Martha shook her head. “I think he’s with young Ash.”
“He’s not,” Kami told her. “Ash has been in there with us for hours.”
Martha stopped wiping the bar. She looked up, and her and Kami’s eyes met. Kami whirled around and ran up the stairs, to Jared’s old room above the pub, to every one of the bedrooms. She flung open doors, telling herself that Jared had been through a lot tonight, they all had, he might just be resting, and her own frantic heartbeat called her a liar.
When Kami went back downstairs, she found the others in the bar, talking to Martha. Everybody was there but Tomo, who must have been left sleeping in the other room. She felt Ash’s feelings before she saw him, hurt and tiredness pierced through with agony, canceling out everything else.
They all turned to her as she came in, even Dad.
Kami held on to the bar to keep her balance and began, even though she didn’t know how to finish. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
The door of the Water Rising slammed open.
Lillian Lynburn stood framed in the doorway. Her hair was wild over her shoulders, tangled up with the lights of burning fires and the coming morning. Her face was white as a dead woman’s.
Her hand was in Ten’s. Kami’s little brother stood there, trembling but safe. Kami had not realized, until she felt like her heart would break under the sheer weight of her relief, how very afraid she had been for him.
Dad crossed the floor in two steps, took Lillian Lynburn by the shoulders, and shook her.
“How dare you?” he demanded, and the townspeople scattered away from them, wearing the same expression they would have worn if Dad had tried to fight a lion in the town square. “Is this your idea of protecting the town? Is that how you want people to think of you—as a witch who steals children?”
He let her go and knelt down by Ten, clasping Ten’s face in his hands, kissing his face. A violent tremor ran all through Ten’s body.
“I’m—” Lillian swallowed, a dry sound. “I’m sorry, Jon.”
Dad stood, Ten’s hand in his now. The people around them looked amazed: he still looked fierce. “You’d better be. If you ever touch one of my children again, I’m going to kill you. And if you expect us to follow you, you’re going to have to change.”
Lillian had no response for that. She was looking past Dad, at Ash. All feeling seemed to drain out of her, standing there gaunt in the shadows. Her eyes were so pale they looked like winter ice instead of blue, the winter ice of the pools where all Lillian’s sorcerers had died.
“Mom,” Ash said, and Kami felt his resolve snap in her mind, knew that he could say no more.
She was the one who had to speak.
“Lillian,” she said, “tell me where Jared is.”
When Lillian answered, her voice sounded distant, as if she was making a proclamation. As if she was a specter or a banshee calling out tidings of death.
“He went to Aurimere alone,” Lillian said. “He got me out. He got the boy out. He saved our lives, and he paid for our lives. I woke outside the house with the child calling me to part the flame and let him through. We waited out in the dark for as long as we could, but Jared never followed us. The boy says Rob caught him, which means that he is in Rob’s grasp now. He is past all help. He is lost.”
Of course he’d done that. How could she, who knew him so well, not have known what he would do? What else would he have done but the most heroic and crazy thing possible? And he had succeeded. He had saved someone he loved and someone she loved, brought them out from under the shadow of death. He was gone beneath that shadow now, vanished into the sorcerers’ manor. Lillian was saying that she would never see him again.
Darkness rose up before Kami’s eyes, as if she was going to faint, but she refused to faint. She felt Ash’s feelings course through her as his gasp rang through the room. He stumbled toward his mother and almost collapsed headlong into her arms. Lillian stood still for a moment, then her hand rose in a stiff jerky motion and she began to awkwardly stroke his hair.
The winter wind blew through the open door, cutting through the shadows, swirling around the people clinging to each other. Everyone was linked, Kami saw, everybody holding on to somebody, and it occurred to her that even if nobody had been willing to fight Rob, nobody had offered up a victim to him either. Nobody had offered the tokens of allegiance Rob had asked for. The people of Sorry-in-the-Vale had not surrendered yet.
Kami let go her death grip on the bar and walked over to the window. She looked out at the frost-touched town and at Aurimere in the distance, swallowed by flames.
“He’s not lost,” Kami said. Her voice was steadier than she’d thought it would be. “I won’t let him be lost.”
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my lovely editor, Mallory Loehr, Rusty fan extraordinaire; Michael Joosten; my wonderful copy editor Deborah Dwyer; Casey Lloyd; Jan Gerardi; and the whole great team at Random House Children’s Books.
Thank you very much to Kristin Nelson and everyone at NLA for everything, forever.
Thank you to Venetia Gosling and the team at Simon & Schuster UK—especially for taking so much cover trouble! And to Kathryn McKenna and Sophie Stott for combining their publicity powers.
And thank you to my amazing foreign publishers, one and all.
Thank you to Delia Sherman and Malinda Lo for help with roooooomance at crucial points, and to Cassandra Clare for magicked telephones. Thank you to Holly Black for being my first reader for this book, and also the first reader (and judicious cutter and rearranger) of the Kiss Scene of Doom. Thank you to Robin Wasserman and Maureen Johnson for general Robinitude and Maureeniness, and to Cindy Pon and Paolo Bacigalupi and Josh Lewis and Theo Black and Cristi Jacques for plotting like fiends.
Thank you to Ally Carter and Jennifer Lynn Barnes for letting me write outside even though the temperatures were “dangerous” and my behavior was “reckless and unsafe . . . again . . . oh, Sarah, why. . . .”
Thank you to Karen Healey and R. J. Anderson for reading
Untold
super early and still sending me squee.
Thank you to the Book Club, especially Stefanie for telling me she wanted to read this early!
Thank you to my whole family, especially my sister Genevieve “Secret Publicist” Rees Brennan.
Thank you to all my friends: in Ireland, in England, and in America, and the best one who came back to Ireland while I was writing this . . . even if she’s in Vietnam by the time it comes out!
Thank you especially to Natasha for still living with me, and occasionally yelling “Why does Jared have to be this way?!”
And I hereby acknowledge every one of the lovely, lovely readers who suffered over the ending of
Unspoken
. I’m so happy you read it. I’m so sorry I hurt you.
(Not that sorry.)
(Secretly a tiny bit glad.)
(Thank you so much.)
About the Author
S
ARAH
R
EES
B
RENNAN
was brought up on a dark shore where clouds hang over a stone-gray sea and sailors meet their doom. (Irish weather: not so good.) Her house was full of secrets, not the least of which was what her parents were feeding the kids for them all to end up being six feet tall! Sarah later lived in New York and then London, writing her first book,
The Demon’s Lexicon
(an ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults), and
Team Human
(a vampire novel, written with Justine Larbalestier) along the way.
She never had an imaginary friend as a child, but now she writes about all the imaginary friends she has as a (sort of) grown-up, and hopes you like them. Visit her at sarahrees brennan.com, or write her at [email protected] to tell her all your imaginings.
Table of Contents
11. A Drop of Blood, a Single Tear
12. A Drop of Blood, What You Hold Dear
14. Call upon My Soul Within the House
16. A Preference for Breathing
18. What I’ve Tasted of Desire
PART V: WANDERING BECOMES TOO LONELY
PART VII: IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
