“You don’t know, do you?” she whispered. “How can you not know?”
Rowan and Hutchincroft were mage and familiar—their communication went deeper than body or mind. They were part of each other. Hutch could reach Rowan through distance, through sleep, through the very worst pain. There were only two things that could separate them. One was magic, though she couldn’t imagine what kind.
She wouldn’t think about the other.
Whatever she had been dreading, whatever Rowan had been keeping from her, it was here.
“Hutch.” Her voice trembled; she forced a deep breath. Rowan had said, only that afternoon, that she was brave. She had said, only that afternoon, that she wasn’t a child anymore. “Hutch, if Rowan is in trouble, we need to find him. I need the scrying glass.”
It was something she had considered often, when she lay awake wondering where he could be at nights. The only thing that had stopped her going to it then was the knowledge that Hutch would never let her. Sure enough, he growled faintly on reflex.
“Oh, for God’s sake, I know I’m not allowed in Rowan’s study without him. But this is an emergency, isn’t it? And you can’t use the glass, so it has to be me. Please.”
Hutch must have known she was right—they did need the glass, and familiars couldn’t use artifacts any more than they could be enchanted. They were too close to pure magic themselves. He hesitated only a further second, out of loyalty to Rowan’s wishes. The next, he was bounding up the stairs, and Biddy was running behind him as fast as she could.
Biddy had been in Rowan’s study many times, when she’d knocked at the door to see if he wanted to come on a walk, or he’d called her in to show her the latest artifact he’d found. She knew the small, curved room at the top of the turret well, with its haphazard piles of books and mingled clutter and charms. She knew the battered armchair by the tiny fireplace, one of the rare pieces of furniture that had been brought across from the mainland in the currach and not built on the island. But she had never been in it without Rowan. It looked horribly empty and grey in the predawn light, as though he had taken the colors with him. There was a cup of cold tea on the mantelpiece, where Rowan had set it that evening, and a half-eaten apple on the desk. He hadn’t come down to supper.
She hadn’t gone up to knock on the door for him. She’d sat downstairs alone in the kitchen, resenting his absence when he’d said that he’d see her again before she went to bed. It seemed a thousand years ago, and now her resentment was a burning shard of guilt in her chest. It didn’t matter. The mainland didn’t matter. His disappearances didn’t matter, nor his secrets, nor his moods. If he could only be home and safe, she’d never want to leave the island again. She’d never be angry at him again. Just please—she found herself whispering it, as a mage would a spell—please, please let him be safe.
Biddy found the scrying glass quickly, the size of a dinner plate with a silver frame, and laid it flat on the desk. The weight of it in her hands made her feel somewhat less useless. She might not be a mage like Rowan; she couldn’t take magic inside her, and she couldn’t cast spells. But enchanted objects had magic of their own, and Rowan had taught her how to use most of them over the years. This, at least, she could do. She paused only to lift Hutch onto the table, so he could peer anxiously into the glass with her.
“Rowan of Hy-Brasil, please,” she said—firmly, in the precise, Hutchincroft-ish tone of voice Rowan had always told her sounded like she was putting through a call on a telephone.
It took longer than usual. Perhaps, like Hutch, the magic had difficulty finding him. But after several anxious seconds the glass fogged, cleared, and resolved itself into an image of a room—windowless and bare, utterly dark but for an eerie green-gold glow that permeated the air like a mist. It was by that faint light alone that she could make out Rowan’s body on the floor. His eyes were closed and his limbs crumpled beneath him, as though he had fallen before he had a chance to catch himself. He might have looked dead, had Biddy not noticed with a shiver of relief that his chest rose and fell. Something silver glinted in his closed fist.
Hutchincroft’s twitching nose pressed to the glass, desperate, as though he hoped to break through to the image behind it. Through her own fear, Biddy’s heart ached for him. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel for them to be separated.
“He’s alive.” She brushed her tangled hair from her eyes. Stay firm, take a breath, think. “And if you can’t wake him, then he’s under an enchantment. An enchanted sleep—I suppose they must be real, they’re in so many stories. But I don’t know what to do about it.”
Hutchincroft thumped his back feet, miserably this time, and looked toward the window. Biddy looked too—the sky was pale grey now, almost white, the sun not far away. She wasn’t sure why that mattered, but she was sure it did. Rowan was always back by sunrise. If he was still asleep when the sun rose, then she had no doubt he would be in danger. Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to come back at all.
Rowan would know what to do. He always knew what to do. If she could just talk to him, even for a minute, he could tell her. But he was so far away in body and mind, and there was no way to get him back.
Or to get to him. The idea came like a candle catching light.
“Hutch! Does Rowan still have that ring he showed me last winter? The one that lets you walk into someone’s dreams?”
She wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Rowan had lost it. But Hutchincroft’s ears pricked, and he hopped over the mirror to a shelf above the desk. Biddy saw the ring even before Hutchincroft picked it up in his delicate mouth. It was a small silver band—Rowan had brought it back one night and showed it to her at breakfast the following morning. She had been fascinated, though wary.
“Why would you want to go into someone’s dreams?” she had asked.
“It’s fun.” He threw the ring in the air, caught it, inspected it. “Besides, you might need to talk to someone a long way away, and this is one way to do it. Bit of a weird way, though, and you can get very lost, so I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Is it dangerous?”
He winked at her. “Well, it wouldn’t be very fun if it weren’t at least a little bit dangerous.”
A weird way, and a dangerous way. But it was the only way, at least as far as she knew, to talk to someone who couldn’t be woken.
“I’ll go into his dreams and try to wake him up,” she said to Hutch, with more assurance than she felt. “Or if I can’t wake him, at least he can tell me where he is and what to do to help. I just need something of his. A scrap of hair would work, if there was some on a hairbrush, or…” Hutchincroft looked at her, and she smiled despite everything. “No, I know. I don’t think Rowan’s ever brushed his hair in his life.”
She ran her eyes over the room quickly, catching on anything hopeful and bouncing off again in disappointment. It had to be a part of the person, Rowan said. Hair, fingernails—blood at a push, if you wanted to make things really weird. There was nothing like that in Rowan’s study. Just books, paper, countless oddments, more cups and mugs than she thought they owned.