Page 5 of A City of Emeralds and Envy
I’ve read the Tama Olc cover to cover many times since I returned. Most of the spells include revolting ingredients, or substances that can only be found in Faerie, and a number of them are designed to produce some truly terrifying results. Others include words I don’t understand, in some ancient Fae dialect.
Even if I could understand every spell and had access to every ingredient—I don’t have magic. Not a lick of it. At least—I don’t haveaccessiblemagic. Riordan says all humans have magic, but it’s the dead kind, locked in our mortal forms, unusable, killing us slowly. It’s the reason we’re mortal. Only sorcerers like Lord Drosselmeyer can access their innate magic for spells, so they live longer than regular humans. For Faeries, the magic in their bodies and souls is active, easily accessible. It fuels and regenerates them in a symbiotic flow that allows them to heal quickly and live for hundreds or thousands of years.
Even without active magic, maybe there’s something in the Tama Olc that I’ve overlooked—something to help me change my parents’ minds or improve my future.
Something that will help mego back.
If I’m honest with myself, that’s what I want. I want to go back there, tothem. To the two Fae males who held me captive, terrorizing and charming me by turns. We experienced something together—a crisis of kingdoms, an intimate bonding, a visceral sacrifice. One of them ran away because he couldn’t bear to see me die, and the other rejected me.
Damn them both. At the very least I need to go back just to smack their savage, beautiful faces—to swear at them and bruise them with merciless kisses.
With the spellbook in hand, I clatter back down the attic steps and hurry through the hallway, past the sitting room door where the voices of Gulch and my parents are still joined in conversation.
In the kitchen, the baby lies in a crib by the window, playing happily with a wooden rattle. The other children are already sitting down to bowls of stew at the table. Little Saylie waves a plump hand and gives me a bright smile, so I pause to kiss the top of her head before heading to the back door. Dorothy joins me there as I slip on my only other shoes—a pair of beaten clogs I use for work in the farmyard.
“I thought I’d go ahead and feed the children, in case you need a moment alone,” Dorothy says quietly, under the loud chatter of the little ones.
“I do need a moment. Several moments.” Tears prickle at the backs of my eyes again.
My brother Ben approaches us, carrying his bowl.
“Dorothy, my stew is too cold,” whines Ben. “Can you warm it up like you did yesterday?”
Ben is very particular about the temperature and texture of his food—an unfortunate quality for a child on an impoverished farm.
“Don’t bother Dorothy with that, Ben,” I protest.
“But she has a special way of doing it.”
Confused, I glance at Dorothy.
Her brown cheeks flush a deep rose color. She glances at the other children, who are oblivious to our conversation. “That was supposed to be a secret, Ben.”
“But we don’t have secrets from Alice,” he counters.
She sighs. “Right. Well… hand over the food.”
When he passes it to her, she cups her hands under the bowl, her brows contracting for a few seconds. Steam begins to rise from the stew. Ben smiles, accepting the bowl. “Thank you!”
He hops back to the table and digs in, while I stare at Dorothy. She gives me a tentative glance—wary, as if waiting for a blow.
“I’m not a sorceress,” she says.
“Oh, I fucking hope you are,” I whisper, seizing her arm. “Come with me.”
3
People think I’m nice.
And I am—mostly. To people worthy of niceness. Like children, for example.
I enjoy children—they’re so full of wonder, so easily impressed, so quick to trust. Their minds are wide open, far less suspicious or cautious than those of adults. You can push any imprint into those malleable little brains, and the harder you press, the longer it will stay, becoming part of them forever.
Alice isn’t a child, but I like her anyway. Her brain is quick, yet she’s childlike in that her mind is eager, curious. Trusting.
When she saw my magic, she didn’t scream or gasp. She didn’t order Ben to back away from me. She grabbed my wrist, a curse falling from her lips, and she dragged me outside, to the old barn—a ramshackle version of the bigger barn that now houses her family’s animals.
I’m not sure how I knew I could trust her with my secret. I suppose I have a sense about such things. My instinct tells me when I can let my mask slip a little, when I can ease out of the confining skin I wear every day—the disguise of the kind, simple, rural virgin. It’s rare that I get to reveal even the tiniest sliver of my true self.
