Page 121 of Time's Fool

“The queen better get back to work, or she’ll be as poor as a pauper after this—”

“We’ll none of us ever be poor again!”

“—whilst the rest of us live like kings!”

“Kings,” she said, brightening. “But then you’ll need a crown to match mine. I’ll see what I can do.”

She dropped everything onto the hodge podge she was collecting and hurried off again, but Gillian and the ghost stayed where they were.

“Alice survived,” the ghost said, nodding after the woman. “She stayed in London when the rest of us left, visiting a friend, for we were coming back there anyway once we’d nursed the injured back to health. We’d planned to escape together, but of course, that didn’t work. She was always flighty and a bit childish, but a canny witch when she needed to be. She disappeared before the Circle caught up with her.

“But Tom died with the rest of us. T’is so strange to see them like this, young and laughing and full of life. And to think how quickly that can change.

“Or change back.”

“Change back?” Gillian said, but Morgan didn’t hear.

“The Circle took everything we had remaining from the haul. All the stuff we hadn’t yet sold, thinking we’d get a better price abroad, and all that we’d bought. I suppose it made sense. The dead don’t need such things, do they?

“But they didn’t find the box. I’d fallen on top of it when I died, and they never bothered to bury us. I’d kept it with me as I didn’t know what was in it or how dangerous it might be, and didn’t want one of the children stumbling across it. And it was dangerous; I had no idea how much.”

“Morgan,” Gillian whispered, her eyes huge. “Tell me you didn’t, that you haven’t—”

“Made a deal with a devil?” the ghost looked at her in amusement. “Of course, I did, once he was sturdy enough. That took ages, and the little cave, more like a cleft in a rock that I found for a temporary hiding spot for the chest, became our home for centuries.”

“Centuries?” Gillian looked like she was having as much trouble as Kit was in parsing all of this.

“Aye. This is a recent memory for you; for me, it feels like another world. I saw our realm change out of all recognition as the years slid by, saw wonders and horrors in about equal measure . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself.

“You need to know how it was, that night. How the Corpsmen came out of the darkness, from sky and land, already firing curses ahead of them; how my people screamed and our children ran and were chased down like animals. There were so many mages, everywhere we turned; we couldn’t fight them all, had no chance. They’d been following us, waiting for us to lead them back to our coven, and we had.

“It was over before it began.”

“I know what that was like,” Gillian said, hugging herself. “It was the same for us.”

“No! Not the same!” the ghost grabbed her arms, and Kit could swear he saw the imprints from her fingers in the cloth of Gillian’s sleeves. “You lived. None of us did. And I was cut down early—they must have known who I was. Five of them targeted me. I was dead before my body hit the ground.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry! Listen!”

The ghost let Gillian go, and turned to walk away a few yards, closer to Kit. Only to whirl back around before she reached him. “I was dead, but not gone. It was the oddest thing: one moment, I was fighting for my life and the lives of my people; the next, I was staring down at my mud splattered face, seeing it go slack in death, knowing what I was before I caught sight of my half transparent hand in front of my face.

“One with no wand in it, for mine was trodden in the mud as well. And no matter, for I could do no more magic. My last spell had died on my lips. All I could do was stand there and watch.

“Watch as the others died, and be unable to help them. Watch as their spirits fled this Earth, as if glad to finally escape it. Watch as the mages finished their work and magicked a mound of dirt over us all. We didn’t merit more than that in their eyes, or perhaps they were just eager to get away, before anyone discovered their crimes.

“Watch as my hand, which lay uncovered, sticking out of the dirt, turned brown and shriveled up and was eventually just a—”

“Stop it!” Gillian tried to grab her, only to find that she had nothing to grip. “You have to let it go, Morgan—”

“I can’t! Don’t you think I’ve tried? Don’t you think I wanted to follow everyone else? To be with them? Instead, I stayed behind, weighed down by what I’d seen, what we had suffered.

“Instead, I stayed with the box.”

“The one with a demon in it,” Gillian said, her face terrible.

The ghost nodded. “I had been drawn to it before death, but afterward—t’was all I could see, once I came back to myself. And passed through the ward around it easily, for I had no body for it to hurt anymore.

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