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“Sorry.” She raised her arm.
“We should probably sit anyway.”
And so they crossed to the rain-spattered bench, which Penbrook tried, rather unsuccessfully, to wipe dry with the newssheet. Once situated, he drew those loose sheets of paper from his pocket, setting them on his knees along with the pen and inkpot he’d taken from the spellshop.
“What are those for?” Fia asked, always intrigued by unusual spellwork. Most commonly, spells were cast by speaking them aloud or recalling them silently, but they could be summoned by touching the words on a page too. And apparently by whatever method Penbrook intended to use.
“You’ll see soon enough,” he promised with a dip of pen to ink and a flicker of magic called forth.
Around them the rain stilled for the length of a breath, each suspended drop a jewel, then resumed falling. Mist sheered across Penbrook’s dilated eyes, the pupils gone vague like the foggy air around them. Staring into the distance, he remained unmoving, one hand over the paper, nib poised.
Fia didn’t know how long they sat there, her cheeks and the tip of her nose touched pink with cold, the umbrella tight in her fist while rain pattered pretty rings in the puddles. She felt so calm in the bubble of Penbrook’s magic that when he finally touched pen to paper, the nib scratched the quiet like a claw.
He sketched quick black strokes without glancing down, looking and looking for some distant object beyond the cemetery and scrawling down what he observed. Never having seen magic quite like this before, Fia watched him work the same as she would a painter at an easel.
His eyes flickered as the illustration took shape, and in the straight lines she recognized the construction of ivy-covered walls and tall windows, shutters to each side. Above, the roof slanted, dark slashes marking the sharp corners and steep peaks. He drew the curved arch of a doorway, a once-grand porch left empty, a wide set of steps, and flanking the manor to each side, a line of willows. The hanging branches swayed magically on the paper, back and forth, back and forth, a moving illustration.
Beside her, Penbrook seemed to return to himself, the landscape complete, the haze of magic lifting away from his body. He scrutinized his drawing.
Fia stared at those ink-black branches, finding it hard to breathe. “It’s here?” The words wheezed out of her.
“Well,” he said noncommittally. “This is what I saw. Do you know it?”
She hesitated before saying the gentle word for an ungentle place. “The Willows.”
“How far is it?”
“It’s north. In Bramble, but…” Fia shook her head, finally tearing her gaze from the drawing and looking up at Penbrook, his dark eyes cleared of the fog. “I… I can’t go there.”
Her hand loosened on the umbrella, and it tipped back, not far, but enough that a few drops of rain fell onto the paper, chasing the still-wet lines of ink so one corner of the manor smeared, elongating the branches of the willows as if they might reach right off the page and pull her into it.
Penbrook seemed not to care about the damage, more concerned with her adverse reaction. “You have a history with the house?”
Fia looked down the hill toward one of the paths they hadn’t taken, where one small stone among all the others bore the name Sable Ives.
Solemnly, she said, “It’s where my mother died.”
CHAPTER 13
Here was everything she hadn’t wanted to talk about after reading the latest article in the Herald—mention of those lightning-filled nightmares that reminded her, most horribly, of her mother’s death.
Penbrook gazed down at his rain-blotched sketch as if he couldn’t believe his hand had drawn it. “Will you tell me what happened to her?” he asked softly.
Fia’s eyes welled with tears, and a few leaked down her cheeks, following the path the raindrops had so recently taken. This time, Penbrook didn’t reach out to dry her face, though it seemed less that he was hesitant to touch her again and more that he recognized she needed to cry.
“Yes, I’ll tell you.” And though Fia usually avoided talking about it, the words fell out of her mouth like pearls, because she thought Penbrook, so near to death himself, might understand. “My mother always loved the wide expanse of Bramble, so she… was out collecting stardust or moon drops, or maybe she was even trying to bottle lightning itself, for some spell or another. She never really confided in me about night-wild magic except to say nothing sparked more brilliantly.” The thought pinched at Fia, both a fond remembrance—her mother’s affection for all untamed things—and a hurtful one—for all the ways in which her mother kept those parts of herself private.
Penbrook nodded without interruption, and his thoughtful quiet made it easier for Fia to continue. To let her words splash like the rain against someone who had his own complicated relationship with his parents.
“It was storming that night, but rain never stopped my mother.” And then came the hardest words of all. “She was struck by lightning. Near the Willows. That’s how she died.” Penbrook drew in a breath, and Fia rushed on, “Please, you don’t have to say anything.”
Penbrook didn’t let her smother his sympathies this time and said, “But I’m sorry. I am.”
He rolled up the paper, tucking it away so she wouldn’t have to look at the drawing, and the pen and inkpot too, then took the umbrella, wanting, it seemed, to do something for her. Even as small as this.
Not knowing what to do with her hands now that they were empty, she folded and unfolded them in her lap. “My mother was never going to leave this world quietly.” Penbrook went a little gray, and then all Fia could think of was his own impending death if they didn’t break his curse. And that he would go quietly. “It can’t be your time yet.”
“Oh, I’ve still got a few more days,” he said around the raw edges of a smile.
