Meadow Faeoria's Arc

Chapter 5 of 12

Meadow leaned on the carriage wheel and looked up at the driver's bench. It was empty. She had made the horses from field mice and the wheels from a rotting shell, but she had forgotten the man to hold the reins. The wand's star flickered pale in her fist. If she pulled another spell from herself, she would fall in the dirt and not get up. Cinder stood in the yard in the storm-blue gown, waiting. The girl did not ask what was wrong. She only watched. "I need a coachman," Meadow said. "I don't have one left in me." Cinder pulled something from a fold of her skirt and held it out on her palm. A small carved figure. A chess knight, black wood, worn smooth at the base. "My father's," she said. "He taught me on this set. My stepmother sold the rest." Meadow closed her fingers around it. The wood was warm from Cinder's skin. "This will cost you the piece." "I know what things cost." Meadow could not spend her own magic. She had another well to draw from, one she almost never touched. Her brother's. Zagreus had left a thread of himself in her wand the day she was named — a older-sibling gift, a spare key. He worked in shapes and returns. He could make a thing wear another thing's face. She set the chess knight on the dirt and knelt beside it. She whispered her brother's name into the star. The wand went cold in her hand instead of hot. That was his magic; it took from somewhere else, not from her. The star burned a low green. The knight grew. Wood became coat. The carved mane became hair, black and tied back. A man stood in the yard in a coachman's jacket, straight-backed, face still, one hand already reaching for the reins as if he had been waiting on the bench a moment before. He did not speak. He climbed to the seat and sat. Meadow stood. Her hands were shaking, but not from the spell. It had not drained her. That was the trouble. She had opened her brother's door and left it open, and she did not know yet what would walk through after. Cinder looked at the coachman. "He has my father's face." "I'm sorry." "Don't be. Keep him until midnight." Cinder climbed into the carriage. She pulled the door shut herself. The coachman flicked the reins. The mice-horses stepped forward. The carriage rolled out of the yard and down the road toward the palace, its lit windows shrinking into the dusk. Meadow stayed on her knees in the dirt. The star of her wand had gone from pale blue to a green she did not recognize, and it would not dim. Somewhere behind her ribs, a second heartbeat had started, slower than her own. Her brother had noticed the borrowed key. He was awake now, and he was listening.