On our way home, Taryn stops and picks blackberries beside the Lake of
Masks. I sit on a rock in the moonlight and deliberately do not look into the
water. The lake doesn’t reflect your own face—it shows you someone else who
has looked or will look into it. When I was little, I used to sit at the bank all day,
staring at faerie countenances instead of my own, hoping that I might someday
catch a glimpse of my mother looking back at me.
Eventually, it hurt too much to try.
“Are you going to quit the tournament?” Taryn asks, shoveling a handful of
berries into her mouth. We are hungry children. Already we are taller than Vivi,
our hips wider, and our breasts heavier.
I open my basket and take out a dirty plum, wiping it on my shirt. It’s still
more or less edible. I eat it slowly, considering. “You mean because of Cardan
and his Court of Jerks?”
She frowns with an expression just like one I might make if she was being
particularly thickheaded. “Do you know what they call us?” she demands. “The
Circle of Worms.”
I hurl the pit at the water, watching ripples destroy the possibility of any
reflections. My lip curls.
“You’re littering in a magical lake,” she tells me.
“It’ll rot,” I say. “And so will we. They’re right. We are the Circle of
Worms. We’re mortal. We don’t have forever to wait for them to let us do the
things we want. I don’t care if they don’t like my being in the tournament. Once
I become a knight, I’ll be beyond their reach.”
“Do you think Madoc’s going to allow that?” Taryn asks, giving up on the
bush after the brambles make her fingers bleed. “Answering to someone other
than him?”
“What else has he been training us for?” I ask. Wordlessly, we fall into step
together, making our way home.
“Not me.” She shakes her head. “I am going to fall in love.”
I am surprised into laughter. “So you’ve just decided? I didn’t think it
worked like that. I thought love was supposed to happen when you least
expected it, like a sap to the skull.”
“Well, I have decided,” she says. I consider mentioning her last illfated
decision—the one about having fun at the revel—but that will just annoy her.
Instead, I try to imagine someone she might fall in love with. Maybe it will be a
merrow, and he will give her the gift of breathing underwater and a crown of
pearls and take her to his bed under the sea.
Actually, that sounds amazing. Maybe I am making all the wrong choices.
“How much do you like swimming?” I ask her.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
She, suspecting some sort of teasing, elbows me in the side.
We head through the Crooked Forest, with its bent trunks, since the
Milkwood is dangerous at night. We have to stop to let some root men pass, for
fear they might step on us if we didn’t keep out of their way. Moss covers their
shoulders and crawls up their bark cheeks. Wind whistles through their ribs.
They make a beautiful and solemn procession.
“If you’re so sure Madoc is going to give you permission, why haven’t you
asked him yet?” Taryn whispers. “The tournament is only three days away.”
Anyone can fight in the Summer Tournament, but if I want to be a knight, I
must declare my candidacy by wearing a green sash across my chest. And if
Madoc will not allow me that, then no amount of skill will help me. I will not be
a candidate, and I will not be chosen.
I am glad the root men give me an excuse not to answer, because, of course,
she’s right. I haven’t asked Madoc because I am afraid of what he will say.
When we get home, pushing open the enormous wooden door with its
looping ironwork, someone is shouting upstairs, as though in distress. I run
toward the sound, heart in my mouth, only to find Vivi in her room, chasing a
cloud of sprites. They streak past me into the hall in a blast of gossamer, and she
slams the book she was swinging at them into the door casing.
“Look!” Vivi yells at me, pointing toward her closet. “Look what they did.”
The doors are open, and I see a sprawl of things stolen from the human
world, matchbooks, newspapers, empty bottles, novels, and Polaroids. The
sprites had turned the matchbooks into beds and tables, shredded all the paper,
and ripped out the centers of the books to nest inside. It was a full-on sprite
infestation.
But I am more baffled by the quantity of things Vivi has and how many of
them don’t seem to have any value. It’s just junk. Mortal junk.
“What is all that?” Taryn asks, coming into the room. She bends down and
extracts a strip of pictures, only gently chewed by sprites. The pictures are taken
one right after the other, the kind you have to sit in a booth for. Vivi is in the
photos, her arm draped over the shoulders of a...